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Today, let's talk about how platforms are responding to
the rise of slop.
To some AI insiders, the novelty of OpenAI's Sora video
generation tool has begun to wear off.
The videos feel same-y; the creative tools are limited; and also there's
that nagging feeling that looking at Sora too long cooks your brain.
At the same time, two weeks after its release, Sora
remains the No. 1 free app in the US App Store. And OpenAI is continuing
to iterate on it, announcing on Wednesday that the app can now be used to
generate videos of up to 25 seconds.
In Sora we find the entire debate over AI-generated media
in miniature. On one hand, the content now widely derided as
"slop" continually receives brickbats on social media, in blog
posts and in YouTube comments. And on the other, some AI-generated
material is generating millions of views — presumably not all from people
who are hate-watching it.
The popularity of surreal AI genres such as "slicing through glass fruit," Italian brainrot,
and shrimp Jesus helps
to explain much of the disdain for them. If slop weren't occasionally
compelling, we might feel like we could safely ignore it. But to some
relatively large audience, they are, the 3 million views on
this AI clip of a knife slicing through glass pancakes and waffles
attest.
And so if you're the sort of person who prefers your
internet man-made — or at least in healthy balance with AI models — the
rise of slop understandably feels like a threat. Increasingly, a
coalition of average people and copyright holders are pushing the
platforms themselves to take action — and they're beginning to see
some success.
One place where this has been true is Pinterest. The mood
board site, which has been besieged by
AI-generated imagery over the past year, on Thursday introduced a feature
to allow users to limit (but not entirely block) AI-generated images in
their recommendations. The change followed a move earlier this year to
begin labeling AI-generated images as
such.
As Sarah Perez noted at TechCrunch,
Pinterest has come under fire from its user base all year for a perceived
decline in quality of the service as the percentage of slop there
increases. Many people use the service to find real objects they can buy
and use; the more that those objects are replaced with AI fantasies, the
worse Pinterest becomes for them.
Like most platforms, Pinterest sees little value in
banning slop altogether. After all, some people enjoy looking at
fantastical AI creations. At the same time, its success depends in some
part on creators believing that there is value in populating the site
with authentic photos and videos. The more that Pinterest's various
surfaces are dominated by slop, the less motivated traditional creators
may be to post there.
Spotify faces a similar challenge. The advent of AI music
tools like Suno and Udio now lets anyone create a relatively cohesive
song within seconds, often with voices that sound very similar to
superstars. The result is that artists now have a new threat to monitor,
lest someone clone three popular voices and create a song that briefly
charts on Spotify — as was the case with this fake collaboration between
Bad Bunny, Justin Bieber and Daddy Yankee.
In Rest of World, Laura Rodríguez Salamanca
surveyed the music industry in Latin America and found that music slop is
increasingly crowding out the real thing. One study she
cites predicts that AI songs will account for 20 percent of streaming
platform revenue by 2028.
"The music isn’t great, but it still sucks away
limited streaming income from real artists," she writes. "The
speed and volume of new AI music is now exhausting human artists and
distracting listeners, said people in the Latin music industry."
Some artists are using AI in creative ways. In particular,
tools like Suno seem to have inspired a new generation of parody
songwriters, who have repeatedly gone viral on TikTok this year with
profane songs designed to shock parents. (I haven't been able to get
"Country Girls Make Do"
out of my head all year.)
But the majority of AI-generated uploads to streaming
services are likely spam. And under pressure from record labels to take
action, Spotify said last month that it had removed 75 million
spam tracks from the service over the past year. The
company introduced stronger rules against impersonation, a new music spam
filter, and a way for responsible artists to disclose their use of AI on
a voluntary basis.
Like Pinterest, the deluge of AI content also represents
an opportunity. Even as it fights to stem the tide of slop, today Spotify
announced a partnership with the major record labels to develop
"responsible" AI products. While the company offered few
details, it said it is establishing a "generative AI research lab
and product team," according to Steven J. Horowitz in Variety.
It also seems to be planning a way for artists to opt in to letting fans
use generative music tools with licensed music, available to artists who
opt in.
Any platform that lets people upload media will find
itself swimming in slop whether it wants to be or not. But for some
companies, the slop is self-inflicted.
Last year Reddit introduced Reddit Answers, a
ChatGPT-like chatbot with access to the platform's posts. It is now in
beta in Reddit forums, and moderators cannot disable it.
That became an issue this week when a user in the
r/FamilyMedicine subreddit suggested that users who are interested in
pain management could try heroin. As Emanuel Mainberg writes at 404 Media,
Reddit Answers also recommended that users try kratom, which is illegal
in some states.
The company said today that it would no longer display
Reddit Answers under "sensitive topics."
All of these platforms are generally designed to get you
to spend more time there. The promise of synthetic media is that they
will soon have a cheap, abundant resource that makes their products more
compelling than ever before. For the moment, though, that abundant
resource is also eroding their customers' trust at a rapid clip. At
platform scale, a big surge of slop really can make everything worse —
and tech companies are now beginning to take that threat seriously.
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