AI: AI 'Slop' ahead in size. RTZ #700

As the saying goes, “One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure”. AI is about to generate epic amounts of both for eight billion souls globally. We’ve discussed the coming flood of both ‘Synthetic Content’ and ‘Synthetic Data’, that’ll enable huge amounts of content with AI going forward.

Not just on social media led by companies like Meta, YouTube, TikTok and others, but every type of ‘content’ as we know it imaginable in this AI Tech Wave.

Axios calls the ‘garbage’ above ‘slop’ in “‘AI Slop’ is in the eye of the beholder”:

“Social media users complain that there’s way too much “AI slop” in their feeds today, but one person’s slop is another’s cool new meme or funny post.”

“Why it matters: Blanket disdain for AI content is less and less useful in a world where AI is part of every digital tool and system.”

• “Instead, some experts say, we need to learn to separate useful or creative AI output from potentially harmful and annoying spam that’s clogging the internet.”

But the volumes involved are about to gap up. Considering just the top ten web traffic sites for the world this year, doing more with AI:

“Soon, nearly all online content will involve AI in some way.”

• While there are pure AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot, developers are also building AI capabilities into all manner of software and even the underlying operating systems of phones and PCs.”

• “In Photoshop, you can use AI to expand a scene or change the background, while Apple, Microsoft, Google and others have added options to get AI assistance for writing.”

Just consider OpenAI’s recent unexpected success with its text to image ChatGPT generation that led to the ‘Ghibli’ image wave globally.

Indications are that it drove hundreds of millions of new users for ChatGPT worldwide, all looking to try out that capability to create their own, personalized ‘AI Slop’, aka memes. Axios expands on this phenomenon, and how it built upon itself:

“Zoom in: Users’ embrace of OpenAI’s latest image generator showed exactly what can go wrong and right when you give everyone the power to turn brief prompts into images.”

• “The first wave of users turned themselves into Studio Ghibli animations.”

• “Then came Muppets, “Simpsons” characters and those from other fictional worlds, followed by AI-generated action figures from photos, complete with accessories.”

• “And now that image generator will be even more places, with OpenAI announcing yesterday that developers can integrate it into their apps using an API.”

And that’s before any copyright issues are addressed and resolved.

“Zoom out: In addition to the unsettled intellectual property issues around copying an artist’s or studio’s style, the ability to create memes at scale also could overload content moderation systems.”

Companies like Meta are leaning into AI generated content with its Meta AI models in particular:

“Our thought bubble: While AI content is starting to flood our feeds, it will flourish or fail largely for the same reasons as other types of content — because we engage with it, or don’t.”

• “Meta is among the companies betting big on AI-generated content. The social giant is putting its assistant everywhere and experimenting with all manner of synthetic content, from suggested images and prompts to AI-created comments and posts.”

And consider the AI content generation ahead for Google YouTube, which just celebrated its 20th anniversary this week changing the world of online content.

The overall point is that the AI generated content to come is going to make everything we’ve seen to date on the internet with social media and video look tame in comparison.

The ‘garbage/treasure’ AI content generation of this AI Tech Wave is just getting started. ‘Slop’ and all. Stay tuned.

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)