Tuesday Tirade: AI Slop

Monday Muse: Going Nuclear Weird Wednesday: Dropping the F-bomb

Tuesday Tirade: AI Slop

It used to be clickbait, then silly—or mostly stupid—engagement questions on everyone’s social media feed, then obviously set-up videos of people ignoring an old lady trying to cross the street before eventually a young girl breaks from her mom and helps her across prompting 1000s of comments like “This is amazing!”, “I cried when I saw this.”, and “This restores my faith in humanity.” until finally someone says what I’m thinking: “Fake!”

The first clue is the person recording video. Shouldn’t they stop and help the poor old lady?

And what about all the ads for stupid gadgets from companies with names like Kina, Toter, Binga, Zepe, Mamo, etc?

And now it’s AI slop. You’ve seen it. The videos of dogs preparing supper, Jesus underwater with Aquaman, American factory workers sewing running shoes, and other obviously fake content.

Then there are the “news” stories. Hours after the plane crash in India last week there were several videos floating around showing various angles and theories. After every presidential press conference there are variations from funny to misleading posts in my feed.

I was going to look for examples but did not want to risk the algorithm thinking that’s all I want to see. I lingered too long on a dog video on Instagram and that’s all I get now.

Is it easy to create? WordPress lets you:

“Angry gray cat pens a sharply worded letter” was the prompt so now I don’t have to pay the angry cat I’ve been using all these years.

“I don’t like the sound of that…”

There are other programs but I’m not willing to signup for free or pay to use it. I do use AI to do a quick graphic for my social media posts because I’m not going to look for a designer on Fivver and pay them to make an “Angry gray cat pens a sharply worded letter”.

Unfortunately, AI gets better every day and I does get increasingly difficult to darken the fake from the real, unless you are watching a Pomeranian preparing chicken parmigiana.

Then you know it’s real…

-Leon

Leon Stevens is a multi-genre author, composer, guitarist, songwriter, and an artist, with a Bachelor of Music and Education. He published his first book of poetry, Lines by Leon: Poems, Prose, and Pictures in January 2020, followed by a book of original classical guitar compositions, Journeys, and a short story collection of science fiction/post-apocalyptic tales called The Knot at the End of the Rope and Other Short Stories. His newest publications are the novella trilogy, The View from Here, which is a continuation of one of his short stories, a new collection of poetry titled, A Wonder of Words, and his latest sci-fi mystery, Euphrates Vanished.

My new book page: http://books.linesbyleon.com/