#AI #GenerativeAI #Bots #AISlop #Spam: "Experiences like this — staring at a collection of books written by AI with computer-generated author photos and dozens of reviews written and posted by bots — have become for many people evidence for the “dead-internet theory,” the only slightly tongue-in-cheek idea, inspired by the increasing amount of fake, suspicious, and just plain weird content, that humans are a tiny minority online and the bulk of the internet is made by and for AI bots, creating bot content for bot followers, who comment and argue with other bots. The rise of slop has, appropriately, the shape of a good science-fiction yarn: a mysterious wave of noise emerging from nowhere, an alien invasion of semi-coherent computers babbling in humanlike voices from some vast electronic beyond.

But the idea that AI has quietly crowded out humans is not exactly right. Slop requires human intervention or it wouldn’t exist. Beneath the strange and alienating flood of machine-generated content slop, behind the nonhuman fable of dead-internet theory, is something resolutely, distinctly human: a thriving, global gray-market economy of spammers and entrepreneurs, searching out and selling get-rich-quick schemes and arbitrage opportunities, supercharged by generative AI."

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-generated-content-internet-online-slop-spam.html