AI Slop: Why Generic AI Content is Polluting the Internet

Hi, folks. Welcome to today's AI briefing. Today, I want to talk briefly about AI slop, which is a glorious name for all the AI-generated junk that we start to see all over social media and elsewhere in the World Wide Web and beyond. So AI slop, generally speaking, it's the stuff that you see that is clearly AI-generated. It's just put out there to generate content, preferably clicks and interactions that often aren't coming, and generally pollute our timelines with various different things.

We see regular posts on LinkedIn with people complaining about, you know, the AI-generated content that goes out there that's, you know, supremely unhelpful. And you know, there was a trade-off right back at the start, people generating thousands and thousands of pages of, you know, meaningless web content so that hopefully Google would rank them higher. And of course, these types of things have come back to haunt websites where Google now like, uh, deindexes you, um, if you've, like, generated a boatload of, of like useless content. Now, of course, there's a trade-off here. That trade-off is the content that you can generate using AI both like, you know, useful from a consumption perspective, but also like formatted and looks normal from a...

what our general expectations are as humans. Because of course, whilst a lot of people interact with AI these days and more and more people are generating things with AI, the consumption of online media is still important that we get, uh, you know, facts and figures that we can rely on that make sense. And so ensuring... Like Google's place in the world at the moment is to try and ensure that that information is consumed properly and indexed fairly. And so you see this with all the AI-generated stuff.

And as we get further into the world of AI and things become harder to recognize, it's not to negate the use of AI. But if you're using AI to generate a load of content to post on social media sites, you know, it becomes a numbing thing. Like the interactions and the quality of those interactions go down. And so what you see is AI slop, bots replying to each other, and so on. And there is obviously a place for AI.

Like I use it in generating these podcasts. I use it for some of the promotional stuff for these podcasts. But I use it sparingly, and I make sure the interactions I have when it comes to interacting online are actually like, you know, me, um, as opposed to relying solely on bots. And I think that's where the, um, the disparity comes in because a lot of people don't do that. But also, you see these days, everyone looks forward to the Coca-Cola Christmas advert.

This year's, though, is generated entirely by, by AI. And of course, it reduces that cost to get the thing to market. But it sort of disenfranchises the people who are looking forward to those types of advertisements every year if everything is clearly generated by AI. And I understand the reasons for it. I don't necessarily agree with the reasons for doing it.

And so when you're generating content with AI, be that posts, website content, you know, images, videos, the whole lot, just think forward a little bit and say, "If you were in the consumer's shoes, or if you were trying to attract interest and referrals to your organization from somewhere else, would they be happy if all they saw was AI-generated content? " If the answer to that question is yes, great. For the majority of us, though, I feel like the answer to that question is no. And so rather than continuing to pollute the infosphere that is social media sites and Google and what have you, just take a step back and consider, "Does this thing really need to be entirely AI-generated? Can I use AI to help me leverage some of the templates or get the ideas together and then write it myself?

Can I write it myself and then tweak it using AI? " Doesn't mean Claude or ChatGPT or whatever to create that content for you. See if you can come up with a way to allow it to augment and short, shorten the work that you have to do whilst also retaining that authentic- authenticity, can't say the word, that is you. This has been the AI briefing. Thanks for tuning in.

I'll be back tomorrow with another one. Bye for now. Why hire when you can partner? Concept Cloud's leading engineers build your startup's prototype without the overhead. Launch faster.

Conceptcloud. com.