Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"To be clear, I am not really interested in criticizing any one individual here. In the absence of stronger rules on Instagram, this just comes down to a question of ethics. I am free to believe that what FutureRiderUS is doing is not ethical; they are free to disagree, or at least pretend to.</p><p>But neither of our opinions matter, because of two facts: fake AI slop is profitable, and there are countless users doing the same thing. There’s absolutely nothing to stop them.</p><p>That is: the Instagram platform doesn’t just enable this behavior, it rewards it. So do other platforms. On Instagram and TikTok, FutureRiderUS’s top hits are from fake LA fires; on YouTube, it’s three-hour long Christmas music compilations with slop visuals of families shopping. None are clearly labeled. Disaster porn is just another kind of <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/content" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>content</span></a>.</p><p>It doesn’t really matter what that content is: as long as it is ‘content that grabs attention,’ both sides can make money.</p><p>For the slop creator and the platform, this is a clear win-win, at least in the short term. The only loser here is the audience, who is unable to recognize slop when they see it.</p><p>There’s this thing that AI proponents like to say every time something new comes out: this is the worst it'll ever be. So far, they've been right, and they may well continue to be right. It’s hard to predict what happens next with AI, but I have one prediction I feel fairly comfortable making: unaided, most of us will always struggle to reliably recognize AI when we see it.</p><p>But it’s hard to blame us when two sides are conspiring against us: Instagram’s interface makes it almost impossible to tell, and creators are incentivized to lie by omission."</p><p><a href="https://www.404media.co/inside-the-economy-of-ai-spammers-getting-rich-by-exploiting-disasters-and-misery/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">404media.co/inside-the-economy</span><span class="invisible">-of-ai-spammers-getting-rich-by-exploiting-disasters-and-misery/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AI</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/GenerativeAI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>GenerativeAI</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AISlop" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AISlop</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/SocialMedia" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>SocialMedia</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Instagram" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Instagram</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/TikTok" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>TikTok</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/GeneratedImages" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>GeneratedImages</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AISpam" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AISpam</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Spammers" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Spammers</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Spamming" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Spamming</span></a></p>