Saturday, 10th August 2024
Where Facebook’s AI Slop Comes From. Jason Koebler continues to provide the most insightful coverage of Facebook's weird ongoing problem with AI slop (previously).
Who's creating this stuff? It looks to primarily come from individuals in countries like India and the Philippines, inspired by get-rich-quick YouTube influencers, who are gaming Facebook's Creator Bonus Program and flooding the platform with AI-generated images.
Jason highlights this YouTube video by YT Gyan Abhishek (136,000 subscribers) and describes it like this:
He pauses on another image of a man being eaten by bugs. “They are getting so many likes,” he says. “They got 700 likes within 2-4 hours. They must have earned $100 from just this one photo. Facebook now pays you $100 for 1,000 likes … you must be wondering where you can get these images from. Don’t worry. I’ll show you how to create images with the help of AI.”
That video is in Hindi but you can request auto-translated English subtitles in the YouTube video settings. The image generator demonstrated in the video is Ideogram, which offers a free plan. (Here's pelicans having a tea party on a yacht.)
Jason's reporting here runs deep - he goes as far as buying FewFeed, dedicated software for scraping and automating Facebook, and running his own (unsuccessful) page using prompts from YouTube tutorials like:
an elderly woman celebrating her 104th birthday with birthday cake realistic family realistic jesus celebrating with her
I signed up for a $10/month 404 Media subscription to read this and it was absolutely worth the money.
Some argue that by aggregating knowledge drawn from human experience, LLMs aren’t sources of creativity, as the moniker “generative” implies, but rather purveyors of mediocrity. Yes and no. There really are very few genuinely novel ideas and methods, and I don’t expect LLMs to produce them. Most creative acts, though, entail novel recombinations of known ideas and methods. Because LLMs radically boost our ability to do that, they are amplifiers of — not threats to — human creativity.