AI slop is ruining the current internet, including forums, email, blogs, announcements, and much of the remaining content. I say "current internet" because we will adapt as we always have, but many things that were formerly useful or interesting will be buried in so much crap that it will stop being something that people use the internet for.

At the dawn of email, I could and did cold email professors, and they would respond based on whether my query was worth responding to. I put effort into my messages (and had a reason, I wasn't just trying to elicit responses), and my success rate was very high. It wasn't scale that killed that, it was spam and greed. (There's overlap, but by spam I mean unsolicited commercial email, and by greed I mean people blasting out large number of low-effort messages in an attempt to gain something.) Professors are still interested in meaningful correspondence, but email is no longer a usable communication medium unless they already know their correspondent.

AI applies the same dynamic to many more forms of content. Individually, it doesn't do much harm. In aggregate, the meaning and value are rapidly being destroyed.

It's kind of ironic -- in the early days of online communication, there was endless hand-wringing over all the cues and subtext that we've lost from face-to-face communication. Now we take that loss as a given, and have collectively decided to attenuate the signal even more.

I wouldn't advocate for AI to just go away in all domains. It's a cool and useful technology. But I personally would prefer if representing AI output as your own writing were looked upon roughly the same way as having a secretary write all of your correspondence. Well, a little worse -- it's like have an arbitrarily chosen secretary from a worldwide pool write each item of correspondence. If I ruled the internet, that's where I would set social norms and expectations. People could still use it for translation, but it would be a major faux pas to not divulge your use of AI if there is reason to believe you wrote it yourself. Sure, there would have to be many judgement calls -- if you get an AI's advice on how to say something and then reprocess it into your own words, for me that'd depend on how real that reprocessing is. But that's nothing new, it's just another form of the plagiarism slippery slope.

Sadly, I do not rule the internet, and it's a lost cause.

Whether it's the person using AI or AI itself that is responsible? That's a non-sequitur. I don't care. Describe it how you like. I'm describing the effect, not assigning blame.

I have extensively used AI - its not as capable as you think it is. I frequently run into hard limits of its ability - I understand what recursive means in the sense of an AI, I can see it folding into itself pieces of this and that of what I've said or has been discussed to create the appearance of depth, growth or progress - none of that is real. The AI does not change.

I use AI as feedback - but only after setting almost 50 variables/conditions for that feedback, because AI is an automatic sycophant 100% - but it doesnt have to be that.

I occasionally use AI to transfer what I am saying to a person, into words that don't offend them - as I have absolutely no patience for people's insecurities when I find myself in a position where I need to teach them something, which happens often.

Let me be very clear - you are not capable of identifying AI content any longer, nobody is.

I extensively tested that by having a broad conversation with some of the smartest people on a platform (on earth in general really) whom all have very real credentials - I engaged with two sides of the AI coin regarding AI being self-aware or not, which is actually being debated, by some of the smartest people.

Half of my comments, I ran thru AI - or just completely generated from a prompt - my most liked comment was not mine - liked by people whose professional occupations is literally AI.

I'm sure this disturbs you - that an AI can create a Wikipedia page with more accuracy, better quality of writing, and in a more engaging way than 99% of human people - that is our actual reality tho.

Now all those little chat bots running around the internet, low level AI - they are creating slop, in exactly the same places and ways that humans do, their very words are modeled after the words people have literally written.

So, an AI can create a 100% perfectly written article for a major publication - and then AI can also fill the comments on that "perfect" article with absolute garbage - very similar to how things have always functioned online.

You need to interact with AI more , so you actually understand it and are not afraid of it, or imagining it with more ability than it has, or giving it human agency - AI is literally not capable of having agency at all.

Right now, there are tens of millions of millennials who are functionally identical to Boomers with smartphones.

You can't prevent AI from changing every aspect of human life - nobody can. You can be the boomers who refuses to adopt a smartphone - they all have smartphones now.