AI Slop Is Flooding Medium
31–40 of 76 posts
Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium
#32Previously, spam has been reported and filtered via "flag" and "report" buttons. Why is that not sufficient for site operators to separate "AI Slop" from other articles? If existing sites choose to tolerate "AI Slop" (why doesn't HN have this problem?), does that create a market opportunity for competitors with better filters?
Websites have a perverse incentive to not remove AI Slop since it increases their UGC metrics. (e.g. amount of new content, engagement rate)
In the case of blatantly false images like on Facebook, they get a surprising amount of organic engagement: https://x.com/FacebookAIslop/status/1806416249259258189
Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium
#33If anything good comes of AI slop, it will be stronger (and possibly more personalized) collaborative filtering. I wish I could upvote and downvote more content in more places in a way that my feedback would be used by people who have chosen to trust me (and vice versa).
Amongst the others things that walled gardens like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok have taken is the open availability of social signals to rank content. Previously Google used links to build some trust metric, but almost no real person creates public links anymore.
Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium
#34Definitely not just Medium. It's everywhere. I have noticed that someone immediately calls out pretty much every bit of content as AI generated, whether it obviously is or not. I guess this is a best case scenario. I do wonder what will spring up next to allow high quality content to be found.
That sounds exactly like what an AI would say!
This is clearly just a bot responding.
Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium
#35Definitely not just Medium. It's everywhere. I have noticed that someone immediately calls out pretty much every bit of content as AI generated, whether it obviously is or not. I guess this is a best case scenario. I do wonder what will spring up next to allow high quality content to be found.
True, I'm always making sure my Kindle is face down when I'm not using it so that my coworkers don't think I'm reading whatever insane AI slop Title Amazon happens to be advertising to me at the moment.
I really don't see how these people making the ebooks are making any money on these books either since they cost 99 cents and they pay for advertising. Maybe they're using llama2 idk lmao, either way I've seen a ton of embarrassing titles pop up on there and don't want people thinking I'm interested in that slop.
Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium
#36Definitely not just Medium. It's everywhere. I have noticed that someone immediately calls out pretty much every bit of content as AI generated, whether it obviously is or not. I guess this is a best case scenario. I do wonder what will spring up next to allow high quality content to be found.
There's so many LLM bots on Twitter now, presumably trying to game the revenue sharing system. Some of them even seem to be getting fancy with multi-modal models because they try to respond to the content of images rather than just the text like they used to do.
Yeah these people are morons. Likely building networks to market crypto scams/fake onlyfans accounts.
Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium
#37> CEO Tony Stubblebine says it “doesn’t matter” as long as nobody reads it. It seems like the leaders of all of these online platforms are going to just bury their heads in the sand and pretend that this massive problem isn't one. This AI trend is absolutely going to destroy many (most?) of these companies. For better or worse, the new age of the internet is already here.
is there anything they can realistically do?
Maybe this is just a Band-Aid, but Medium has a "boost" mechanism.
I'm not sure of the exact machinations, but the times that my posts have been boosted, it's always been by a publication on Medium where a human editor has read my content and 1) asked that I submit to their publication and 2) submitted to Medium for boosting.
Seems like this type of filter -- as long as they actually keep humans in the loop -- can potentially work to keep high quality content more visible.
Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium
#38> CEO Tony Stubblebine says it “doesn’t matter” as long as nobody reads it. It seems like the leaders of all of these online platforms are going to just bury their heads in the sand and pretend that this massive problem isn't one. This AI trend is absolutely going to destroy many (most?) of these companies. For better or worse, the new age of the internet is already here.
I'm a paying member of Medium although, due to time constraints, I only really read the articles in the Weekly Digest emails at the weekend.
I have noticed a lot of these articles that just make no sense at all starting to appear in my weekly email to the point that I probably won't renew next year if it stays this way, so it isn't just "nobody reading them".
Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium
#39Definitely not just Medium. It's everywhere. I have noticed that someone immediately calls out pretty much every bit of content as AI generated, whether it obviously is or not. I guess this is a best case scenario. I do wonder what will spring up next to allow high quality content to be found.
Yeah this is all very dystopian. I don't see a 'pay to publish' scheme working, neither do I see 'pay to read'. Maybe I could see 'pay to prove humanity' working, but the Voight-Kampff test is expensive, inaccurate and can be gamed, and accounts which passed it will be sold.
We're between a rock and a hard place with the internet's collective signal to noise ratio plummeting and no easy way to fix it.
Re: AI Slop Is Flooding Medium
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
is there anything they can realistically do?
Maybe this is just a Band-Aid, but Medium has a "boost" mechanism. I'm not sure of the exact machinations, but the times that my posts have been boosted, it's always been by a publication on Medium where a human editor has read my content and 1) asked that I submit to their publication and 2) submitted to Medium for boosting. Seems like this type of filter -- as long as they actually keep humans in the loop -- can po…
That's exactly what they are doing