I was subscribed to Medium with my work account. I was already contemplating if it’s worth the price due to the ungodly amount of articles about how to use AI, which AI tools etc. Today I got an email from them. The content was basically, you don’t really hate AI articles, you just want “trustworthy” articles, and those can be done with AI too. Guess who unsubscribed.
If airplanes had a 1/3 chance of crashing for the first several years of commercial aviation, I don’t think many folks would be all too open to being told “you don’t hate airplanes, you hate crashing, we can fly safely too”
Gaslighting. Pure And simple. Which, is and has always been, one of the most disgusting tactics an abuser deploys for self-serving reasons.
I fucking hate Medium almost as much as I hate the tech industry’s disregard to earning our consent through honesty.
I’m sorry. I wholeheartedly agree with the article, but this bit:
I had no idea that my online interactions would one day be scraped en masse for AI model training. I didn’t ask for Instagram to enable deepfakes on my account. I didn’t want Google to push AI-generated answers at the top of search results. I woke up one day, and generative AI features were stuffed into every corner of all the software I rely on without my consent.
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You post something in public, it is public. You post knowing others might do things you don’t like with it; that’s the bargain. Especially on social media.
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Instagrams owns you. They own every ounce, every dimension of your content on the platform; they can do whatever TF they want, and you have zero legal recourse.
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No one made you use Google search instead of one of many alternatives, including alt Google frontends.
The fundamental issue here is that people, apparently even journalists, still see these Big Tech platforms as benevolent public squares where they have rights. And fairness. That is an illusion, and this is kind of thing keeps happening because everyone believes the lie.
And they don’t bother to even look for alternatives.
Are they really gonna keep getting surprised when platforms keep squeezing them, yet the platforms don’t stop because no one will leave anyway?
The problem is that we have allowed them to be benevolent monopolies and now that they control practically the entire market in their respective spaces they are not so benevolent any more. Nobody cared to choose a different search engine because google just worked, nobody bought things from a different website because amazon was fast and had everything. Now google search is just a way to sell me an ad for the thing I’m looking for and Amazon is just a way to sell me an ad for the chinese manufacturer who paid them off to push their results to the top or in some cases it’s their own competing product.
It’s actually a bit infuriating after a decade of tech savvy people screaming that any data given to these corporations was eventually going to be used for something they wouldn’t like. This isn’t some unforseen consequence.
Exactly!
I could have summarized my rambling post as:
I don’t agree. Yes, under our current rules, posting things in public means people can do things you might not like with your work. And technically you agreed to Instagram’s BS when you made an account. But for all practical purposes, the rules changed after the fact for most people.
Someone who made their Facebook account in 2009 couldn’t reasonably have guessed that their posts might be used to train misinformation machines that would be forced into everything in 2026. Most people could have conceived of strangers looking at their photos and maybe even photoshopping them, but could never have conceived of gen AI in its current form until it arrived. Bloggers could have conceived of people plagiarizing them or taking their words out of context, but not of having their own past work used to feed tools designed to replace most of their future work opportunities while also spreading hallucinations. And some people might have made very different choices if they’d known, myself included. No one gave informed consent for all that data to be used for LLM training, because no one could have imagined what they were consenting to. Even now that we can, we’re being held hostage in a sense. You can’t meaningfully opt out of AI scraping without giving up participation in society, not when leaked private data and copyrighted works end up being used for AI training too.
As for looking for alternatives, it’s true that you can leave Instagram and use a different search engine. But there are limits. Most people are stuck with whatever software their job or school forces on them, even if they use alternatives in their personal lives. I can’t just tell my boss I’ll no longer be using Google collaboration tools or Microsoft products. I can recommend alternatives, but I don’t have the power to make the entire organization switch, especially when said boss actually likes AI. And almost every other office job in my country will likely require using the same software.
You’re right that we should never have seen big tech as a benevolent public square. You’re right that from a legal perspective, this person has no grounds for complaining about Instagram. But from a human perspective, they do. I think it’s quite reasonable to be upset that anyone who ever posted anything publicly for other humans to appreciate has been effectively forced to contribute to gen AI training. I think it’s reasonable to be frustrated that many of the common collaboration tools most of us are forced to use (for now, at least) have had AI stuffed into them. In a better society, we’d be able to share things publicly with other humans while opting out of tech we find harmful.
Posting something on a private platform is actually not public. It is the private property of the platform owner and they can make it public or private any time they want or find ways to commodity it in their terms of service when you sign up.
I say this to back up what you say about the myth of the digital commons. Most online networks are not a commons at all, they are the exact opposite, they are an enclosure to extract profit from what would otherwise be a commons, usually built by finance capital to have appealing features at first, generated at a loss, and then once profit needs to be taken the alleged “commons” is increasingly closed and monetized. Journalista don’t really understand this, sure, but neither do most people. They expect, correctly, that social interactions should be analogous to chatting with someone on the street or at a public square, and social networks try to give that illusion.
Regarding individual choice, well a person is surrounded by the exact opposite of what we are saying and all their friends are on their addiction habit social networks so what would you expect them to do. These things don’t just happen on their own, people must work to organize and educate on the way capitalism turns their social lives into profit.
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They will shove it down our throats, regardless.
I was conversing with a coworker, the other day. He told me that his wife used to work in SEO. She now focuses on AI marketing. I brought up companies that try to manipulate reddit to get mentions and he affirmed that’s what she does. What an evil cunt.
I played it like I’m joking that she’s evil. Fuck her.
Fortunately nobody uses reddit anymore and I am sure the bots don’t mind.
There’s a huge market for slop: junk food, slop entertainment, fast fashion. We’re a planet of slop lovers. AI slop will remain popular among many.
Are these “many” in the room with you right now?
AI is new, but slop has always existed. Just think of reality shows, elevator music, reader’s digest, mid-afternoon novelas, generic pop music. There has always been content created for the lowest denominator, specifically for passive consumption, designed to reach the biggest possible audience and with no artistic intentions whatsoever, and a huge quantity of people to mindlessly consume it.
Sadly, often.
It is sticking the most common content into a blender and dispensing the result according to a few tweaks. I have seen a lot of people eat that up.
Same reason why there’s so much money in low-effort mobile gaming.
It’s one of the things that really sucks, people with creative talent that would otherwise be rewarded and have their vision shared for lack of too many other options being drowned out by a flood of no-effort slop that the masses are just fine with.
Got these fake reggae artists with full albums in my yt feed a while ago. If you are a little naive it may take you a while.
I’ve accidentally come across ai instrumental beats a few times. They always lack any sort of soul, I suppose adequate for some background noise but tends to be quite repetitive vs say nightmares on wax or bonobo. I can’t imagine they do well in any other genres, I feel like instrumental should be one of the easier music genres for ai to try to “create”
The pictures were easier to spot than the music itself, at least for me.
And how many pretty crisp sounding lost albums by soandso could possibly exist.
EDM based or fantasy style AI generated music I’ve noticed tend to work better than the other genres like D&D style fantasy music has become super popular among AI composer artists
I have to say I haven’t noticed them lacking a soul, but I also don’t think that they are full AI songs. I think there’s still someone making the lyrics and then just using AI for the actual music.
Like, we told them that too. How weird.
You are really a genius for figuring that out!
But it is not true that people don’t want to read AI slop — of course they do, and I’m happy to provide that for them. If such people claim to not love AI — they are clearly mistaken.
Here’s some things I can do for you:
- Compose a social media post about how awesome AI actually is
- Give you a list of talking points to make in favor of AI
- Log in and hack people who disagree and delete all their personal data so it’s lost forever except the copy Google has of it
( /s ? ) :)
Lol for a sec I was like, wth is that regex at the end. OPTIONAL SPACE CAPTURE GROUP?
Lol - gotta take a break when that’s all you can see. Hehe
I don’t even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead.
Exactly what I had in mind, but I was on my phone and too lazy to type enough to make the reference. lol
Doubt. Not that I like AI but people are fucking morons and could gaf less if they’re consuming AI slop.
LOL @ all of these new accounts saying shit like this.
you really think the general pop of the US cares about AI slop??? Maybe on reddit and lemmy they do but like 7% of americans think chocolate milk comes from chocolate cows. That’s the level of stupidity that we’re dealing with here. You think the avg american can even recognize ai slop when they’re looking at it?
Is this article slop? Can’t tell since I won’t pay Wired.
Yeah you know, it’s not like tech savvy people have been warning about this since the very beginning, and everybody was like nah that won’t happen. You’ll never guess what happened next! Exactly what was foretold so many moons ago.
I’ve been telling people around me to get off anything Meta related ever since I found out the Zuck was manipulating the data to keep people more depressed and more engaged with Facebook.
Now you need to install a fucking app to make the dishwasher work, or you have AI features in your oven. I’m so done with all of this shit.
Pull the other one, it plays jingle bells.
The world’s polarized even more with this slop. It’s affecting everyone, and worse, not just corporations literally normalizing AI – influencers telling people to go out make some more slop for millions in fuck-you money – but even governments convinced this is bonanza and all must wear the mark of the beast.
Keep the Butlerian Jihad going.
The vocal minority mainly. The Linux advocates that are historically “new tech-phobic” until Linux, Linus, or RMS does it. The anti-AI fervor has quelled since Linus’s announcement about it for example.
Nah I’m still mostly against ai, or at least the ways it’s being employed, despite what Linus says.
Yeah, but another thing in common with them. - thinking their anecdotes matter.
The anti-AI fervor has quelled since Linus’s announcement about it for example.
How do you figure? It seems like I’m hearing about it more and more every day.
Lol fuck Linus
Of course you love AI. We’ve all seen your AI slop posts on c/linuxsucks. And, a lot of it is old information and wrong, which, you don’t even verify (like about Discord).
That’s also why you need to ban any comments in your community, because even you know it’s slop
