Don't consume slop! Here's how to recognize and avoid AI generated content.

(Image created using DeepAI's image generator)

What is AI Slop?

Broadly speaking, those of us who create content for the web do so for one of two reasons: 1) We have something we think is worth sharing or 2) we need to create web pages that can be laced with ads to produce revenue.*  

From the advertisers point of view, all web pages are potentially places for ads. Advertisers don't necessarily care about the pages' content, so long as they attract plenty of viewers/readers to whom they can show ads.

In recent years AI authoring tools have become readily available to anyone. These tools can generate mountains of content in a matter of seconds. And all that content means plenty of places to plop ads in front of eyeballs. 

Unfortunately, much of this automated content is flat. While it may serve as a medium to carry ads, it is devoid of the type of personal perspective or passion that might animate a human writer. 

Now there's a name for this stuff: It's called AI slop. Wikipedia explains: 

"AI slop", often simply "slop", is a term for low-quality media, including writing and images, made using generative artificial intelligence technology, characterized by an inherent lack of effort, being generated at an overwhelming volume... (Read more here.)" 

When the Bots Melt Down: A Political Example

Rachel Maddow provided a YouTube example of automated bots (short for "robots") that are amplifying or even creating pro Trump content, though some of it is clearly contradictory. Check out her video "TRUMP BOT MELTDOWN..." 

How to Distinguish AI Slop from Human Writing

As Rachel Maddow made clear above, it's getting more and more difficult to distinguish AI generated videos from those created by humans. Here's an illustration:  

So how can we tell what's real and what's an AI created fake? I asked Perplexity (the "free AI-powered answer engine") this question: "How can I distinguish human written content from AI generated content?" It recommended that I look for differences in these characteristics of the writing itself:  

• writing style and quality
• depth, accuracy, and authenticity
• emotional and narrative consistency
• perplexity and burstiness
• quickness and volume

Also, it said I could use these online tools to check the human authorship of a piece of writing: GPTZero, Originality.ai, Turnitin, Content at Scale’s AI Detector, and Writer.com’s AI Content Detector.

The bottom line: There are plenty of ways you can research that piece of content to determine if it was written by a bot! Try some of the above when you're in doubt.

Will AI Slop Result in Less Internet Use? 

If you're thinking that all this sounds like we're heading for a serious internet credibility crisis, you aren't alone. In her article AI Slop Might Finally Cure Our Internet Addiction, Emma Marris writes: 

"Many of the internet’s best resources for getting everyday answers are quickly being inundated with the dubious wisdom of AI. YouTube, long a destination for real people who know how to repair toilets, make omelets, or deliver engaging cultural criticism, is getting less human by the day: The newsletter Garbage Day reports that four of May’s top 10 YouTube channels were devoted to AI-generated content. Recently, the fastest-growing channel featured AI babies in dangerous situations, for some reason. Reddit is currently overrun with AI-generated posts. Even if you never use ChatGPT or other large language models directly, the rest of the internet is sodden with their output and with real people parroting their hallucinations."

So it's up to us!

If the above sounds a little "doom and gloomy" take heart! The one thing we can count on and ultimately leverage is human greed. The people publishing this AI dreck are in it for the money, you can be sure. So we need to 1) avoid their obviously bot-supported AI generated crap by not clicking on it and 2) call them out for puking it out at us by publicizing how lazy and exploitative their websites really are. By doing so we may be able to slow down the degeneration of our web by bots and keep the creations of humans alive and well. 

(See my previous article A Curated, 21-Video Study Guide for Absolute AI [Artificial Intelligence] Newbies: What It Is, Where You Can Play with It & How We Might Want to Shape Its Role in Our Lives.)

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* Note: I create the stuff I publish here for reason number one. That is, I just want to share it. However, since Google hosts this website and all Blogger-powered websites at no charge to the publisher, they place ads here to help recover the costs of hosting. I have no control over these ads. They just show up, as Google sees fit!

Outlier: How I Survived Life as a Teenage Outsider

Reborn: The 16 Year Old that Finally Ended the Bullying

[This month I celebrate my 76th year on this planet. And no, I no longer look like that kid above who's sitting on the hood of his 1960 Ford Falcon. Recently I discovered the essay below in a long-forgotten Google Keep file. I honestly can't remember writing it. But it all rings true, so I must have. Please indulge an old dude as he takes a bit of an introspective trip down memory lane.]

I woke up to the dark side of social networking in a 13-year-old body that was over 6 feet tall. Such a body, standing upright but only nominally coordinated, is a bully magnet.  Guy teens in local-school-branded shirts who know each other's moves and can damned near finish each other's sentences are all too happy to knock such a body over, sit on its chest and spit in its face. And the more 13-year-old girls who are around to witness the ignominious toppling of such a pubescent giant, then the noisier will be the bullies' cat calls and the more creative their insults. 

I remember one such event, lying there on the warm, tar-smelling back street of a PA oil refinery town. I was red-faced for lots of reasons and struggling to break free of my tormentors. I flashed on the last time I had had such a view of the cloud-crowded PA sky. It had been less than 20 miles away in a fallow, overgrown field near Amish country in late July, the tall, browning grass pushing up past my arms and legs and smelling like the hay bales it would soon become. I was blissfully alone, though my dog was somewhere nearby. I couldn't see him, but I could hear him rustling through the field, most likely chasing one of the many rabbits who regularly taunted him. It was slow-breeze peaceful and the greener weeds and timothy grass and moss that framed my head seemed to be breathing back at me with its own wet, oxygen-rich breath. Overhead, like a slow-motion kaleidoscope, the bright white, billowy clouds drifted around against a deep-blue sky and morphed into all sorts of evocative shapes that challenged my young imagination to label them as various people, places or things. 

At the edge of that field our single acre of lawn bristled bright green and short. It was a moat of sorts, surrounding my family's first own-it-through-payments house. It was a simple "pre-fab" model that had been put up in just a few days, fresh from the factory and delivered by trucks in several giant pieces. No more rent payments! Instead, my parents had their first mortgage. This place would be my home for all six grades of elementary school. It was the place where the bus stopped out front to pick us up for school and it was the place those same buses would discharge us at the end of the school day. And on that peaceful, empty acre of ground surrounded by neighbors' far-flung dairy cattle and hay fields, I seldom saw anyone other than my little nuclear family. So "normal," for me, meant alone, aside from the occasionally irritating little brothers or my almost-silent and always compliant best pal, my dog.

It was here that my consciousness came to life. Other than the limited time spent in the forced socialization of the public schools, I was free to wander the fields, climb trees and do whatever I wanted or just hang out in my little bedroom and read. 

Eventually, at the end of my elementary school, my dad was given a promotion and we moved to be closer to his work. Our new home was in a proper, two-story house on a small lot in that little oil refinery town. And the general area was a bit of a shock. Wandering its streets alone, I seemed to put off gravitational waves that pulled kids from porches and back yards. Singly and in small clusters they would come up and try to engage and ask questions and guess my height and weight. From the solitude of my bedroom window I could see them moving around the streets in clumps. They jabbered and jostled and tested each other's various strengths. I was perplexed that they seemed to spend so much time and energy maneuvering for position in unfathomable hierarchies. I couldn't figure out how the social ranking worked. And when it got too difficult to ponder, I just let it go. I would go for long bike rides, sometimes alone and sometimes with my dog. And this was all the company I needed.

Two years of life in this little burg meant many, many "hold him down and humiliate him" sessions. And I never did crack the social code. So when my dad was transferred far away, I was relieved. And I resolved that things would be different in our next small-town home. 

...................

My first confrontation in that new environment put me face to face with the toughest teen in town. He had no way of knowing that I had years of adolescent humiliation and rage built up. He wasn't deeply committed to a battle. He just figured he was going to push around the new guy. So that first confrontation ended with me exploding all over him and mopping up the floor of a local gas station with him. I never had another bully bother me in that community. 

I went on to be class president and lead singer in a rock band. Eventually, I earned my B.S. & M.S. degrees, co-founded a successful instructional design consultancy with my wife, wrote five books and traveled the world teaching and consulting on project management. In recent years, I've become involved in my local Indivisible group, working to bring about political changes that reflect my optimistic, left-leaning political values. 

So those moments of humiliation on the pavement in that smelly little refinery town in PA lit a fire in me. It was the fire of determination to take charge of my own fate and to change things for the better. And, as horrible as it was at the time, I'm now grateful I experienced it. 

Who says you can't start over? 

Santee Lakes are for the Birds

(Scroll down to see photos & skip the verbiage.)

For the past couple of months we have endured the banging and crashing and dust-making frenzy of our next door neighbor's complete remodel. I mean the place has been ripped down to the studs, the roof is gone and for eight hours a day all hell is breaking loose over there. And it's not the kind of noise you can adapt to easily: It's a bunch of pounding or sawing, followed by a brief (?) silence or a generator pulsing or someone dropping a stack of 2 x 6 lumber on a cement sub-floor. These are the kinds of noises that our lizard brains register as potential danger... sharp, loud and then mysteriously disappearing while the intervening silence itself becomes threatening by vaguely promising another surprise crash-bang soon to come.

So this is the nerve wracking auditory chaos which sent us on a quest for a peaceful retreat. Fortunately, we have a small RV trailer sitting in our driveway to serve as our escape pod. And -- lucky us! -- we found our retreat a little over a hundred miles away in Santee, CA, just outside San Diego. From their website: 

"Santee Lakes Recreation Preserve hosts over 700,000 visitors annually. The 190‐acre Park has seven beautiful recycled water lakes that are stocked with sport fish year-round.  Two million gallons of water each day is recycled at our Ray Stoyer Water Reclamation Facility north of Santee Lakes, and the water flows through Santee Lakes which creates a unique recreation area." 

Now I'm no fisherman. But I do like hanging out in places that have lots of critters to observe. And there are all sorts of birds to be seen there. According to their website: "Santee Lakes has approximately 230 different species of birds that either live here full-time or pass through to avoid the cold... [so] Santee Lakes is the perfect place to photograph, and enjoy birds of all kinds."  And photograph and enjoy them I did on my long, quiet, morning walks. Below are some of my photos.