Photomontages

Reflection

With AI-slop on the rise, I worry for the older and younger generations. I feel like both have a hard time determining what is real, fake or unsure of how to interact with this new source of ‘entertainment’. On one hand, I have an older family member sending me AI generated news stories about starving Palestinian children mixed in with messages of an AI cat cooking up his animal friends. People claim that they cannot trust the news or that everything is fake or “AI” but in the face of actual AI or deepfakes it’s the one thing they convince themselves is real.

In my neighborhood, I see kids holding “Italian Brainrot” character plushies that their parents bought off a street vendor, most likely unaware that these characters are not from any sort of intellectual property. These children enter kindergarten knowing the nonsense words of an AI song but cannot recognize the letters in the alphabet.

As the article mentioned, these companies are aware of how predatory their attention-seeking practices have on their consumers but a buck is a buck. Youtube will continue to have AI Slop on their children-safe side of the website, Facebook will have trending AI posts with thousands of bots in the comments and X users won’t stop asking Grok to explain things for them. No matter how harmful or wrong the content is, at the end of the day people are still consenting to its consumption.

At the same time, the president and politicians, people who are supposed to represent us on a national level, use and interact with AI making it seem more normalized than ever before, especially to boost their propaganda tactics and bully others with micro aggressions and name calling. Though this is all a recent phenomenon, as the AI bubble grows and more news spreads about how harmful it is for our environment and peoples electric bills, I doubt we will see a change in how the public uses AI until it finally collapses on itself.