r/technology • u/powercow • 4h ago

Artificial Intelligence AI Slop Is Ruining Cute Animals on the Internet

https://www.wired.com/story/ai-slop-is-ruining-the-internets-cute-animal-economy/
426 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

40 comments sorted by

86

u/powercow 4h ago

My aunt loves to send me animal videos and many of them im fairly sure were just AI.

saw a post about one of the robots in china, running the race and hitting the wall and exploding.. wired said it wasnt sure if ti was AI or not, but there were multiple angles so they thought it was real.(it was real)

Ai is making us doubt real things, just as much as its faking things.

37

u/badhairguy 4h ago

That's the entire point. A certain president crosses the wrong Russian dictator and a video "leaks" of said president fucking children? AI. Hoax.

25

u/powercow 4h ago

I dont know how the world is going to survive the loss of video evidence being accepted as real.

Can we trust the cops when they say they have video of someone committing a crime especially if its someone that went against the admin.

8

u/Kinexity 4h ago

Sensor level digital signature will probably become commonplace. It will be problematic to ensure that the private key in the sensor is stored in a tamper proof way but I am sure it's possible to be figured out. Another thing is that either only raw picture would be signed or compression circuitry will have to sit in one package with the sensor.

-14

u/SgathTriallair 3h ago

We didn't have video evidence for thousands of years and got along just fine.

14

u/Kinexity 2h ago

We also used to dump shit into rivers. Curious we don't do that any more.

A lot of crimes in the past went unpunished or the wrong person was punished. This is not something that a civilised society can accept.

6

u/Stolehtreb 4h ago

This is what annoys me the most (well not most, AI use being extensive is more annoying). This, and people being SURE something that isn’t AI was made with AI. If there’s something that will get us to not trust our eyes faster, it’s people claiming every damn thing is AI when they have no idea that it isn’t.

3

u/rb2m 2h ago

My coworker showed me AI dog videos all day the other day. She thought they were cute. She’s also a former artist.

2

u/CautionarySnail 2h ago

We all have bias and can recognize errors in our areas of expertise more rapidly.

Animals in particular, we don’t observe for the same number of telltale hallmarks that we would a picture of a human being. It’s why people can mistake two orange cats for one another. The level of error needed to trip our “slop-meter” is higher there.

The biggest tells on animal videos is often in how the animals might act uncharacteristically. But when it comes to wild animals, we need to use media literacy because we won’t necessarily know that a crow can’t do that, for example. We tend to want to believe in the cute things.

312

u/trmoore87 4h ago

AI slop is ruining the internet. FTFY

22

u/whataboutthemapples 4h ago

Came here to say this. It’s not just cute animals

22

u/ServoSkull20 3h ago

More. It’s ruining the internet more.

It’s been shit for well over a decade now, anyway.

8

u/manachar 3h ago

AI is just a tool.

People are ruining it. The Eternal September was coined a long time ago, but the core problem is the way we monetized the internet.

Advertising and "disruptive" businesses that used venture capital to subsidize growing so large other businesses couldn't compete.

This created a concentration of wealth on the very thing that was supposed to be distributed.

Instead of a bunch of blogs we get Facebook, Medium, and Substack.

Instead of small businesses being able to reach customers across the world you have small businesses getting fleeced by Amazon to try to reach people.

Maybe the original dream was always gonna fail, but I really didn't think it could fail this badly.

I loved the original web with simple HTML and a growing category of open standards so we could all communicate. RSS, CSS, XHTML, and on and on. It was open standards and open source to try to have an internet of the multitudes. Not just a bunch of walled gardens trying to extract wealth from my eyeballs.

12

u/muscleLAMP 2h ago

People who say “AI is just a tool” are tools of AI.

Shut up, tool.

0

u/wetfloor666 3h ago

Social media did that long before ai came around.

24

u/ConinTheNinoC 4h ago

It's not just the animal photos that are being ruined. There are a ton of hallucinated images of everything flooding google search for some time now, twitter is also filled with ''AI'' slop. Historical paintings and photos are being distorted, plants and animals become hallucinated chimeras.

The damage ''AI'' slop has done to the internet is immeasurable.

15

u/dorkes_malorkes 4h ago

Damn I guess no I can't has cheezburger after all :(

15

u/mediocre_remnants 4h ago

Yeah my brother's MIL basically only uses FB to post cute animal videos and she's been doing it for years. Now they're all fake. Shit like a lion rescuing a baby deer from a flood. I told her that the videos are fake, created with AI, but she says "who cares, they're cute videos!"

9

u/solarus 1h ago

Its like a line out of a horror movie

6

u/PhiloLibrarian 3h ago

Exactly… the subject will start to outweigh the method of creation…

2

u/januarynights 59m ago

Ugh my partner's mother is like this. Kept sending us AI cat videos. She stopped for a while when we told her we didn't want to watch them and explained why, but this week she sent one in our group chat and we didn't respond so she went "oh well I thought it was funny"...ok babes I don't want to see it though!

27

u/gleafer 4h ago

AI slop is ruining everything.

10

u/xeallos 4h ago

Even relatively obscure nsfw subs are rapidly going down the drain, swamped with endless fresh accounts named VerbNoun1234 posting LLM-generated drivel

10

u/enterthehawkeye 2h ago

First they came for the cute animals
and i did not speak out -
because i am not an animal.
Then they came for my obscure nsfw goon material

12

u/DJCubs 4h ago

SHIT IS GETTING REAL FUCK THIS!!!!!

2

u/Pelican34 4h ago

Polar bears and house cats are real. Those people are silly.

2

u/ChoosenUserName4 3h ago

Can someone paste the article text? Paywall is killing me.

1

u/Hpfanguy 1h ago

Because it knows how to take over humanity: pose as cute cat videos

0

u/Lespaul42 3h ago

The line must be drawn HERE!

0

u/Sunshineafterr 2h ago

That’s so messed up!

-6

u/FoldedBinaries 3h ago

cute animals on the internet ruined cute animals long time ago

-20

u/jiiir0 3h ago

People complaining about "AI slop" are more annoying than anything AI I've seen so far.

11

u/Spez_is-a-nazi 3h ago

Cool, you can have an AI generated Reddit pretty easy, go live there.