While Last Week Tonight host John Oliver is not someone you'd expect to see on a photography-oriented website, he just might have the most frightening and plausible take on the danger of AI-generated imagery yet. It's worth a watch.
I'm going to go ahead and give him the credit for coining the term "AI slop" to describe what it is that's flooding our social media feeds—whether it's disturbingly cute cat videos that are obviously, to everyone except parents it seems, generated by artificial intelligence, or more insidious posts like this one that fooled a committeewoman of the Republican National Convention, who spread it far and wide:
This picture has been seared into my mind.
— Amy Kremer (@AmyKremer) October 3, 2024
My heart hurts💔😭 pic.twitter.com/SCwEMP0aXC
Why did I use the word "insidious" there? Because AI imagery posing as compelling photojournalism is a danger to actual photojournalism. In this case, the photo of the non-existent girl holding the non-existent puppy in the non-existent flood was meant to undermine the Biden administration's response to actual flooding. But more than that, it's a shot at all the real front-line rescue workers out there saving actual people. As Oliver also points out, it's noise that floods social media and prevents those same rescue workers from finding actual people who need saving in an emergency, because they're checking social media, too.
While I admit I have watched a disturbing number of videos of people turning into giant vegetables, it's the less obvious ones that make it harder and harder to tell what's "fake news." In the last year, with video generation getting more and more sophisticated, it's difficult to parse what is actual news video—of attacks in the Middle East, or forest fires, or floods—from what is AI-generated. Oliver points out some of the obvious tells, such as text that doesn't actually say anything or even look like text, or misproportioned objects in videos, but those things might not be so obvious to people scrolling through TikTok on their phones.
But for creators, one of the hardest parts is getting their actual work drowned out by content mills churning out hundreds of these videos and photos a month in the hopes of going mega-viral and monetizing the posts. It provides less space for actual artists to make a name (and a buck) for themselves.
And more and more every day, it feels like we're drowning in a sea of "AI slop."
Oliver goes on to discuss the dangers of this, especially to people who actually create art and news imagery, but the highlight comes at the end, where he actually takes concrete steps to help at least one artist whose work has directly been impacted by this trend of junk AI flooding the web. Worth the watch until the end.
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