Do AI labels work? Tech companies are struggling to flag AI content. Across the internet, tech companies are undertaking a generative waste detox, overwhelmed in many cases by the same slop first made possible by their own A.I. tools. Mobile messaging apps, restaurant review sites, scholarly archives and dating services are all rooting out or downplaying junk generated by A.I. — many relying on the same technology to pull off the purge. People are tiring of A.I.’s effect on the environment and its pressure on jobs and mental health. A.I. slop is just another “festering wound,” said Aidan Walker, a content creator and researcher studying online trends for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a global affairs think tank. “Users have gradually gotten more and more upset about it,” he said. “The climate of opinion has now recognizably shifted, so these companies are finally confronting these problems.” Generative A.I. can produce increasingly realistic images, audio and videos, but only some of it qualifies as slop. Tech companies are largely targeting the kind of low-grade clickbait that is easy to make, spread, consume and forget — the fast fashion edging out couture, the pink slime subsuming the steak. Unchecked, the synthetic swamp online could “crowd out human creativity, corrode cultural value and destabilize public discourse,” European researchers wrote last year. Caption from article by Tiffany Hsu, The New York Times. This was made in collaboration with the @MediaWise Teen Creator Network.
20.91% ERengagement of this clip — above the author's average (13.09%)
top 100%outperforms 0% of the author's clips
4%of the author's average views
