John Oliver covered the dangers of AI on his weekly HBO show, calling it “worrisomely corrosive” for society.
Last week tonight, Oliver said, “The widespread use of the AI generation tools made it very easy to overflow social media sites with inexpensive, professional, and often odd content, using the term AI Slop to describe everything.”
He calls it “the latest iteration of spam”, with strange images and videos flooding people's feeds, and being told “I don't know at all that it's not the real thing.”
“It's very likely that he's been drowning this shit in the near future,” Oliver said.
With content like this, “The whole point is to get your attention,” and the barriers to entry have been reduced given how easy it has become to make it.
Not only did Meta join the game with its own tools, it also fine-tuned the algorithm. This means that more than a third of the content in your feed comes from accounts that do not currently comply. “That's how the slops sneak up without your permission,” he said.
There is a monetization program for people who have successfully made it viral, and now there is a range of AI slop masters who teach people what to do for a small fee.
It was “ultimately a spam-like volume game in all forms,” leading to AI generators tearing off the work of real artists without credit. But “Because of all the stories of wealth in the videos of those slop gurus, the money involved may be relatively small.”
It can only be a few hundred dollars, sometimes hundreds. That becomes a megavirus. This means that much of it comes from countries where money is further advanced, such as India, Thailand, Indonesia and Pakistan.
One drawback is that you have to explain to your parents that the content is not authentic. “There's a really cute animal that's against reality and I'm sure it's not Moo Deng, it's AI,” he said.
It also has environmental impacts on the resources needed to generate it, and there is a worrying spread of misinformation.
Oliver spoke of many fake disasters created with images and videos showing tornadoes, explosions and crashes of planes. “Air travel is scary enough now without people creating new disasters,” he said.
Generated AI has also been used during the Israeli-Iran conflict, causing problems for first responders last year in floods in North Carolina. Republicans were also used to show that Biden was not dealing with the latter situation well.
“There's quite a bit of shit for the same people who have been screaming 'fake news' over the past decade and suddenly become so open, shouting 'fake news' with headlines that they don't want to face actual fake news,” he said.
The spreads didn't hurt as much as some heads feared in last year's US election, but AI is “already significantly better than it was back then.”
He added: “Not only will you be fooled by fakes, but your very existence will lead you to dismiss real videos and images as fakes by bad actors.”
Oliver says it's all “corroded to the concern of the concept of objective reality,” and finds the platform difficult to detect AI.
“I'm not saying that some of these things aren't fun to watch, that some of these things are potentially very dangerous,” he said.
