For shame
On slop videos, emotional manipulation, and the emotion that should be attached to a whole enterprise online
The “social” part of social media is becoming ever more a misnomer as the various mainstream services become ever more cluttered with “content” generated by artificial-intelligence tools. Totally synthesized memes on Facebook, waves of “slop” videos on YouTube, and dispatches from imaginary workplaces on LinkedIn are choking the feeds of users.
■ Incentives create this problem, of course: “Engagement” becomes the magnet for time, and user time is ultimately what the sites are selling. If users aren’t willing to turn away from low-quality content, then low-cost producers will churn out more of it in huge volumes.
■ But there is something else to it, and that’s shame. There are lots of things that people don’t create (or consume) because they are considered undignified. We need to attach a like kind of stigma to those who waste other people’s time with materials they merely asked a machine to hallucinate.
■ We make a huge mistake if we think that “intelligence” is strictly a thing that can be stored on digital memory and reconstituted at will. Imagine the hubris involved in using an LLM to steal the attention of an audience with an emotional message invented entirely by a thing that had never tasted as much as a slice of birthday cake or smelled a dryer sheet, much less experienced infatuation or suffered failure.
■ It’s hard to imagine calling anything “intelligent” when it has no access to either sensory experience or feelings. Yet people using AI to generate content in order to manipulate other people for profit are doing just that, but with mercenary intent. There is a word for that, and the word is shameful.