Rise and Ruins of AI Slop
Have you heard about the growing issue with AI? It’s called ‘AI Slop’ and it only adds to the skepticism surrounding AI. This problem is a critical juncture in identifying the importance of researching multiple sources first, before posting your content or trusting what you see, by reading only one article, one source.
AI slop refers to the mass dump of poorly produced images and content solely produced by AI models. With zero human involvement, this spam has faced controversy for its content lacking accuracy and fact-checking. With this spam including images, videos, and articles, it’s become easier to convince and fool people with the wrong information. Any auto-generated apps like Chat GPT, Gemini, or OpenAI are open to this low-quality content that spews across the web pages we visit.
What makes this ‘AI Slop’ so damaging for websites? For one, AI lacks the authenticity and fact-checking capabilities humans possess for genuine content. In fact, a huge tip in noticing AI-generated content comes from the robotic tone of an article, or an over-polished image. While AI has the impressive quality to mass-produce images or writings, clearly their priority is quantity, rather than quality. And plenty of AI slop results in low-quality content. So, Google has stepped up in flagging any AI spam/scam related content in websites to ensure that it’s not overridden with unreliable resources. But, it’s still crucial that you make sure the content you read or cite in a post or research papers, etc. is authentic an based on facts.
How can this affect businesses? Without a proper source list, if any, there’s no way of telling if that information appears credible. Businesses may use AI to generate content, but if that content contains slop as mentioned above, it will end up being inauthentic, which will result in a loss of faith in your brand. Additionally, misinformation tends to spread rapidly among users and gain trust despite its falsehood, and if that information was especially generated by AI, it can be conceived as slop and tarnish the brand’s reputation. Apart from the potential reputation damage, carrying low-quality, non-credible content holds a huge liability risk.
How can businesses avoid the chaos that AI slop can cause?
1) Prioritize human oversight: Having a team of human editors review and refine AI-generated content to maintain accuracy and consistency can clear up errors and maintain brand integrity.
2) Focus on quality over quantity: as long as the content’s quality remains high, companies shouldn’t stress over churning out tons of content. Making necessary adjustments to the content works through quality control measures. How? Your team should regularly re-ass AI-generated content you use for its quality.
3) Tailor AI to specific needs: Using customized AI models and training data to align with the brand's voice and audience needs.
Remember, AI is a helpful assistant, but replacing a human’s work entirely with AI could end up harming your brand. Plus, AI can never fully hold the genuineness of humans, so use it sparingly.
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