Michael Calore: Therefore, publishing is definitely the top priority for the industry list of the original works that AI plagiarizes, and we should all know because we are all in the publishing industry. But there is something that is the opposite of thoughtful human work, which is the AI slope. The word explains itself when you say it out loud, but let’s talk quickly about what the AI slope is and why it seems to be everywhere.
Lauren Goode: I can take this, however, I do want to throw it back to Kate because Kate, you are the queen of AI Slop, and I’m not saying you will generate it. I don’t mean it’s part of your personal content creation vector or anything we say, but you’ve written a lot. AI Slop is just low-quality, fragile AI content that appears online. It is surging our feed. It’s often on social media, but not just on social media. Now, it is considered legal, citing “news”. For example, last month, the Chicago Sun Times and Philadelphia Inquirer both released these special sections to recommend summer reading lists, and the list includes a bunch of makeup books by the real authors, the names and titles just thrown together randomly. However, Slop is more than a makeup thing. I think it has a certain aesthetic. This is part of this growing trend toward Internetization, which of course was written by Cory Doctorow for Wire.com a few years ago, and now I’m just the term we use. It feels like spam, sometimes easy to identify, sometimes just not.
Katie Drummond: So, you mean that the video I saw on Tiktok walking on the beach was not real?
Lauren Goode: No, that’s true.
Katie Drummond: Oh well. That happened.
Lauren Goode: Those did happen.
Katie Drummond: Oh well. Because I’ve been praising all of this because I want to see more. So that’s AI. knew. OK
Lauren Goode: Yes, it’s anyway. Stand out of JD Vance with Pope Leo, that’s true.
Katie Drummond: Oh, I have…yes, of course.
Lauren Goode: Yes. He has not been killed yet.
Michael Calore: Many of these examples are interesting or interesting, but some are more serious. Recently, AI Slop has appeared in current affairs in the Middle East, right?
Katie Drummond: Oh, of course. Yes.
Michael Calore: Politicians and world leaders will forward these things, even knowing they are fake, just because it attracts their sensitivities, and it can help them spread the information they want to spread.
Katie Drummond: Oh, and when I feel stressed and uncomfortable, I joke, I want to say it’s incredibly uncomfortable and stressful. I think you all agree that I am a journalist now. Try to be the editor-in-chief and let me tell you. In fact, watching AI is radiating across the internet, on all of these platforms, and sometimes consumers mistake it for both news and media. Once again, because of the way AI, because of the way AI changes the way people are accessing information, so because of the way AI is, we are in the moment of survival of news and media. The publisher is essentially in the crosshair of all of this again, to add to the insult of injury, then you open Tiktok, Jesus and Donald Trump are fishing, like it’s everywhere. If you are a journalist, it’s like it’s around because you’re going through the slope itself. You’re seeing what it does online for information landscapes, and then you’re banging your head against a brick wall because Google does that, or something else outlined by AI, and suddenly I invented the numbers. I’m indeed inventing the numbers, but suddenly your search traffic drops by 50%, which has survival consequences for publishers. And this weird thing caught my attention, Kate, you’ve reported this, which is what AI-generated content is actually like the features of some websites and actually works very well for them. Therefore, it was found that on LinkedIn, everyone’s favorite social network, more than 54% of English articles are likely to be AI-generated. Now, LinkedIn says they monitor posts to identify low-quality and repetitive content, but AI may indeed be good at LinkedIn because generic, bland writing is what LinkedIn thrives. I think it’s interesting. This isn’t necessarily a good thing, but it’s just another sign of how Pervasive Generative AI is online.
