Similarly, email spam that is easy to automatically categorize is not a problem.
Making slop less sloppy makes the problem worse, not better. You could claim that that's only up to a threshold, but there's a pretty strong information theoretic argument against that.
I'm assuming you are advocating for AI to "go away" or be banned or something of that nature - that is most definitely not a valid argument.
AI doesnt do anything. People set the AI on a task. People have every right to ruin the internet however they see fit (within legal realms) and I dont even think you are actually upset about the actually more "unleashed AI" that post comments and participate in chats with specific agenda - you are annoyed with the websites that are mostly AI content...
The AI didnt make the website, select the topic prompt, and paste that onto the page -> a person did that. Your actually upset at people for not posting content up to your standards - which people have been saying the entire time the internet has been a public thing.
I honestly do not understand what part of this whole process, and AI content in general, appears so empowering for this.
Your argument is essentially akin to "people don't kill people, guns do" and all artuments framed this way, operate under an assumption that they are like some arbitor of quality - and simply by stating "AI Slop" it makes it so.
All of this is nonsense.
At the dawn of email, I could and did cold email professors, and they would respond based on whether my query was worth responding to. I put effort into my messages (and had a reason, I wasn't just trying to elicit responses), and my success rate was very high. It wasn't scale that killed that, it was spam and greed. (There's overlap, but by spam I mean unsolicited commercial email, and by greed I mean people blasting out large number of low-effort messages in an attempt to gain something.) Professors are still interested in meaningful correspondence, but email is no longer a usable communication medium unless they already know their correspondent.
AI applies the same dynamic to many more forms of content. Individually, it doesn't do much harm. In aggregate, the meaning and value are rapidly being destroyed.
It's kind of ironic -- in the early days of online communication, there was endless hand-wringing over all the cues and subtext that we've lost from face-to-face communication. Now we take that loss as a given, and have collectively decided to attenuate the signal even more.
I wouldn't advocate for AI to just go away in all domains. It's a cool and useful technology. But I personally would prefer if representing AI output as your own writing were looked upon roughly the same way as having a secretary write all of your correspondence. Well, a little worse -- it's like have an arbitrarily chosen secretary from a worldwide pool write each item of correspondence. If I ruled the internet, that's where I would set social norms and expectations. People could still use it for translation, but it would be a major faux pas to not divulge your use of AI if there is reason to believe you wrote it yourself. Sure, there would have to be many judgement calls -- if you get an AI's advice on how to say something and then reprocess it into your own words, for me that'd depend on how real that reprocessing is. But that's nothing new, it's just another form of the plagiarism slippery slope.
Sadly, I do not rule the internet, and it's a lost cause.
Whether it's the person using AI or AI itself that is responsible? That's a non-sequitur. I don't care. Describe it how you like. I'm describing the effect, not assigning blame.
I use AI as feedback - but only after setting almost 50 variables/conditions for that feedback, because AI is an automatic sycophant 100% - but it doesnt have to be that.
I occasionally use AI to transfer what I am saying to a person, into words that don't offend them - as I have absolutely no patience for people's insecurities when I find myself in a position where I need to teach them something, which happens often.
Let me be very clear - you are not capable of identifying AI content any longer, nobody is.
I extensively tested that by having a broad conversation with some of the smartest people on a platform (on earth in general really) whom all have very real credentials - I engaged with two sides of the AI coin regarding AI being self-aware or not, which is actually being debated, by some of the smartest people.
Half of my comments, I ran thru AI - or just completely generated from a prompt - my most liked comment was not mine - liked by people whose professional occupations is literally AI.
I'm sure this disturbs you - that an AI can create a Wikipedia page with more accuracy, better quality of writing, and in a more engaging way than 99% of human people - that is our actual reality tho.
Now all those little chat bots running around the internet, low level AI - they are creating slop, in exactly the same places and ways that humans do, their very words are modeled after the words people have literally written.
So, an AI can create a 100% perfectly written article for a major publication - and then AI can also fill the comments on that "perfect" article with absolute garbage - very similar to how things have always functioned online.
You need to interact with AI more , so you actually understand it and are not afraid of it, or imagining it with more ability than it has, or giving it human agency - AI is literally not capable of having agency at all.
Right now, there are tens of millions of millennials who are functionally identical to Boomers with smartphones.
You can't prevent AI from changing every aspect of human life - nobody can. You can be the boomers who refuses to adopt a smartphone - they all have smartphones now.
