John Oliver covered the dangers of AI on his weekly HBO show, calling it \u201cworryingly corrosive\u201d for society.<\/p>\n
On Last Week Tonight, Oliver said that the \u201cspread of AI generation tools has made it very easy to flood social media sites with cheap, professional-looking, often deeply weird content\u201d using the term AI slop to describe it all.<\/p>\n
He referred to it as the \u201cnewest iteration of spam\u201d with weird images and videos flooding people\u2019s feeds, with some people having \u201cabsolutely no idea that it isn\u2019t real\u201d.<\/p>\n
Oliver said that it was \u201cextremely likely that we are gonna be drowning in this shit for the foreseeable future\u201d.<\/p>\n
With content such as this, \u201cthe whole point is to grab your attention\u201d and given how easy it has become to make it, the barrier of entry has been reduced.<\/p>\n
Meta has not only joined the game with its own tool but it has also tweaked the algorithm meaning that more than a third of content in your feed is now from accounts you don\u2019t follow. \u201cThat\u2019s how slop sneaks in without your permission,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
There are monetisation programs for people who successfully go viral and now a range of AI slop gurus who will teach people what to do for a small fee.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s \u201cultimately a volume game like any form of spam\u201d and has led to AI generators ripping off the work of actual artists without crediting them. But \u201cfor all the talk of riches in those slop guru videos, the money involved here can be relatively small\u201d.<\/p>\n
It can be as little as a few cents and then sometimes hundreds of dollars if it goes mega-viral which means that a lot of it comes from countries where money goes further like India, Thailand, Indonesia and Pakistan.<\/p>\n
One of the downsides is having to explain to parents that content isn\u2019t real. \u201cIf you see an animal that\u2019s so cute it defies reality and it\u2019s not Moo Deng, odds are it\u2019s AI,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s also an environmental impact to the resources needed to produce it as well as the worrying spread of misinformation.<\/p>\n
Oliver spoke about the many fake disasters that have been created with images and videos showing tornadoes and explosions and plane crashes that don\u2019t exist. \u201cAir travel is scary enough now without people making up new disasters,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Generative AI has also been used during the Israel-Iran conflict and posed problems for first responders with the flooding in North Carolina last year. It was also used by Republicans to show that Biden was not handling the latter situation well, with fake images used on the right despite them being told they weren\u2019t real.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s pretty fucking galling for the same people who spent the past decade screaming \u2018fake news\u2019 at any headline they didn\u2019t like to be confronted with actual fake news and suddenly be extremely open to it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
While the spread wasn\u2019t as damaging as some head feared during last year\u2019s US election, AI is \u201calready significantly better than it was then\u201d.<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cIt\u2019s not just that we can get fooled by fake stuff, it\u2019s that the very existence of it then empowers bad actors to dismiss real videos and images as fake.\u201d<\/p>\n
Oliver said it was all \u201cworryingly corrosive for the concept of objective reality\u201d, with platforms finding it harder to detect AI.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not saying some of this stuff isn\u2019t fun to watch, I\u2019m saying that some of this stuff is potentially very dangerous,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"John Oliver covered the dangers of AI on his weekly HBO show, calling it \u201cworryingly corrosive\u201d for society.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":209176,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-209175","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-technology","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114735867684415491","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209175\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/209176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}