alt Hacker NewsI wonder if (or, more accurately hope that) this kind of slop will eventually die out as people realise how little care is put into it. I am more and more convinced that if the devil existed he'd take care of the bigger stuff, but have an army of little devils that encourage people to do things like make unsupervised automated podcasts about knitting, relentlessly chipping away at the messy joys of living.
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For a long time I thought that the AdSense business model was ultimately doomed because I assumed that people hate ads as much as I do. It turns out I was just wrong about what most people are willing to put up with.
Just like Big Tobacco moved onto greener pastures in the developing world, Big Slop is not targeting specifically us, but the billions of new internet users who connected over the past decade:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS
There's this (now old) meme called "Italian brainrot" - AI generated characters with vaguely Italian-sounding names like Bombardiro Crocodilo (note the incorrect spelling of the Italian word for crocodile).
One character stands out - Tung Tung Tung Sahur. Not only does it not sound Italian at all, that last word rang a bell.
Sahur (or Suhur) is the meal eaten before dawn during Ramadan.
After some digging I discovered this whole category originated in Indonesia. The country experienced an absolute explosion in the number of internet users in recent years and is home to internet phenomena which spread globally, but few in the west seem to realise that.
I'm afraid it'll lead to a weird music-ification of content.
Music can make you feel good and keep you engaged just purely out of engaging our pattern recognition.
AI videos and photos seem to have a similar effect. Even if it's not real, they encode enough patterns from good human work to be able to engage our attention.
Just proving people with an attentional escape is valuable on the internet.
It's definitely the sort of thing that Crowley from Good Omens would be working on.
Yeah, people will reflexively filter out the slop, eventually, but they'll do it by leaving the places that have been rendered worthless by its persistent presence.
The particular type of innovator ghoul that's enabled by generative AI dreams of filling the entire internet with bullshit content. Aggregators (media and content) should be actively pushing them out for their own long-term survival, IMO.
At the start of Good Omens, there’s a scene where demons are sharing their recent misdeeds. A couple of them are sharing “classic” demon stuff like killing and possessing, but Crowley (the protagonist demon) shares more modern evil deeds, such as creating traffic jams.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Omens
I’d link to a clip of it, but to your point some devil is making it frustratingly hard to find.