The fediverse used to feel pretty anti-ai, but over the past month or two I’ve noticed a LOT of generated memes and images, and they tend to have positive votes.
Has there been a sudden culture shift here? Or is there a substantial percentage of people just unable to tell the difference anymore?
Haven’t seen a difference but I also block / downvote everybody / community that posts ai slob so …
Haven’t seen a difference, but I also focus almost exclusively on the communities I’ve subscribed to. Checking the all or local feed has been annoying and useless since day one, so nothing has changed.
I don’t see it, which is horrific considering that others do. can you show a few examples that you think is AI slop?
Its usually deleted by mods fairly quickly because its often being posted into comms that specifically ban it. I saw it in politics comms, shitposts, 196 and more
and how unambiguous is it that those are AI generated content? is it like blurry colors on images, 6 fingers and 3 hands, or what do you recognize on them?
I think I can identify generated images, but text… well I can’t even decide. Probably I just can’t so far, because I don’t remember any posts or comments that were suspicious
Identifying them is a skill for sure. You learn what you have to look for, but it depends heavily on the art style that was used. Most people are usually better at identifying hyperrealism ones than comic style ones for example.
The internet is steadily becoming Facebook. Full of idiots being force fed AI slop. Alarmingly confident in their wrongness about almost everything.
They are flooding the zone, there are countless pro-AI generated content instances. It’s like playing whack-a-mole, I often downvote obvious and human-altered slop (it’s all slop to me). Unfortunately, there are going to be images that have positive votes despite the general dislike of said AI-slop, especially because I tend to block those slop instances these days. Naturally, most of it is objectifying women (something I don’t want to see anyway) so those will naturally get a lot of votes because people weren’t thinking with the right head.
People don’t care. as long as they can get their infinite scroll with funny picture, they’re happy.
This brings up an excellent point about addiction. A
quicklonger than I’d planned anecdote: over the last few years I’ve nearly completely dumped all social media (and big tech in general). Facebook, Insta, Twitter, all gone. The only social for the last few years I’ve had left was Reddit, and I dumped that a couple months ago (all social media is toxic, I learned).I swapped Reddit for Lemmy a few months ago and noticed a huge difference, not just the fewer toxic people, but in the lack of posts overall by comparison. I found myself scrolling through the same Lemmy posts throughout the day, my brain trying to repeat the cycle from Reddit, but stayed strong and didn’t go back to Reddit haha.
Anyway, there’s still toxicity on Lemmy, and I realized how much it affects me without the cloud of all the other socials bogging it down. Not a lot, but enough. So I made a decision and went back to my old nerd days. I didn’t want to miss out on legit articles I was interested in from social media so I set up an rss reader. I started checking out Lemmy in the morning, and my rss throughout the day, which doesn’t update often.
What I found at first was I was re-checking lemmy, re-loading rss, and thinking about what else I can put on my phone to scratch that itch. I was (am) still addicted to the dopamine hit of forever-feeds of useless garbage. So instead, I picked up a book. It’s been a long time, and it’s a slow adjustment, but wow is it ever so much better. Aside from some small interaction on Lemmy in the morning like this, I don’t see comments anymore, I read the info I’m interested in reading and make my own judgments without comments trying to sway me, and use my former doom-scrolling time to read a book.
To sum up, you’re absolutely right. Addiction is a bitch and the average person doesn’t even realize they’re addicted.
I was never big in most social medias except YouTube and Discord until recently where I have to be as im an adult and it’s expected for you to. It really made me realize Lemmy is WAY less toxic than others and it’s very rare online to have a meaningful conversation with someone.
for example on Instagram there was a joke post by a pretty lady that said “my boyfriend just paid to get his tires rotated, doesn’t he know that his tires rotated every time he drives?”, obvious satire. but the comments were ALL insulting the lady calling her a bimbo and shit. Like genuinely people there won’t read a comment longer than 2 sentences.Yeah most comments sections are cesspools that only feed the negative wolf inside us. It’s interesting that now that I’ve cut out most comment sections, I realize how absolutely tiring it is being a part of them, or just reading them.
Lemmy is pretty good overall, but I really am starting to love just a basic RSS feed. Looks like what I’m used to (Lemmy/Reddit) but only links to articles, no comments at all.
As long as it’s intentionally made by a human and the end result is high quality, I personally don’t really care what AI or other tools they did or didn’t use to create that result
I feel like the problem with AI generated content is it’s so easy for anyone to generate stuff, so there can be a huge amount created with little effort. There is high quality AI-generated content, but whew there’s a lot that’s total slop.
I don’t know what the best response is, though. Requiring disclosure of AI-generated comment doesn’t seem like it would help because that’s going to be mostly honor system. User-flagged could be used to brigade/suppress posts. Really it’s probably just a matter of blocking users and communities where you see consistent slop.
Yeah I agree. The issue is that image generation tends to result in maximally bland outputs, and the people who post it tend to put minimal effort in.
I’m not categorically anti-ai, but I feel like I am in practice.
what i’ve thought about for a while now is that when it becomes efficient enough that you can generate multiple images per second you can tweak settings and prompts live, which makes it a hell of a lot more of an actual tool rather than just a gamble that it makes something good enough.
when people can actually iterate on it and easily influence the result it’s no longer just algorithmic slop, it’s basically an image editor and drawing software in one, and you just start with a computer-generated base
of course there’s still the issue of unethical training of the models, but that will hopefully be solved in the near future as people collate ethical datasets.
John Oliver did a show on this recently, in summary: “not all AI is spam, but all spam is AI”. My take, legitimate accounts with a long history are cheap to generate, they’re a great purchase to help spread bad faith disinformation and look legit. It’s a business model.
Same with Reddit. In fact I’d just decided to delete the Reddit app and just hang out here, because the AI slop has become intolerable. But really I’m seeing it everywhere. Google News used to be interesting and now again AI slop. Is this the end of human-based online articles and interactions?
It’s been everywhere for a while, but the fediverse seemed like a last bastion up until very recently where I’ve noticed a change.
Is this the end of human-based online articles and interactions?
I sure hope not. At least it’s just a few posts here that are generated for now. If it ever gets to the level of Reddit, I might just leave.
I just haven’t noticed really. The reality is that memes, even ones that were made by hand with a lot of effort, are disposable content. Most of them will get looked at for like 10 seconds tops before you either move on or maybe check out the comments. Nobody who isn’t obsessed with finding the AI slop is going to notice the difference between an AI meme and just a shitty photoshop job.
That’s not to say I’m not concerned by the effects of that. Lower effort needed means more low effort stuff, but it’s not really something I’ve clocked as being particularly out of the ordinary.
I’m thinking it’s like ads. Some people see them, read them, click the links. Others recognize by glance and filter them out without bothering to process.
Social media, and internet in general, has always been a wild mix of top notch content and bottom of the barrel garbage sharing screen estate.
If people would stop talking about AI all day then it probably wouldn’t be used as much as it is every day.
No lie. If anything, this site reminds me that ChatGPT might handle a task for me.
I honestly don’t see much from the comms I follow (and it’s a lot thanks to piefed topics), and when I do browse all, if I find a post from a comm that allows them, I either ignore it or block the comm, for example a genAI art comms.
Idk, lemmy, mbin, piefed, etc isn’t reddit with algorithms so it’s kind of on the user if they see a lot of it, IMO.
A lot of people are some combination of lazy, stupid, ignorant, and/or indifferent.
Is this post AI generated?
Personally I block all the meme communities.
Damn, I don’t follow any meme stuff anywhere but Lemmy. Guess I’m late to the meme party, I kinda hated them for the first couple decades of the 2000s.
Meh. They are fine in moderation but whole communities just about them is to much for me. Its like I block all sports ones to and im not 100% uninterested in sports but its not something I keep up with daily or even weekly.
“slop” is being thrown around just like “socialist” and “gay”. Save it for actual AI slop. Just because something is made by AI doesn’t make it automatically “slop” 🙄
There’s always been plenty of human-made content that is slop. AI is just another tool to make easy content. Trying to categorize everything done with AI as slop is lazy and shifting blame, ignoring the difficulty in both moderating large volume as well as the lack of a definition of what is and isn’t “good”. Which really ends up coming back to the individual, who has means to shut out places that are regularly a problem to them.
God I remember deep fried memes. That was around when i decided humanity needed to be reset.
I’m referring to stuff that I consider low quality. I don’t mind if something is generated, as long as it is labeled as such and is interesting or valuable in some way.
I somewhat agree. It’s overused
