Discussion
Dear Fediverse, thank you for being a safe haven from AI slop.
This morning, I checked out Pinterest for the first time in forever and saw an image purporting to be a LEGO set that was obviously AI generated - yuck!
Then on Reddit's popular page there was a video compilation of people saving children from terrible falls = AI slop.
YouTube's homepage: a short video showing a child and her dog covered in mud = AI slop.
What was I thinking? I should visit #Lemmy and #PeerTube instead...
@_elena DuckDuckGo has a search setting that removes AI-generated images from results.
I get where you’re coming from — the amount of auto-generated junk pushed on mainstream platforms has gotten exhausting. It feels like every feed is tuned to maximize engagement, not quality, so once AI sludge performs well, the algorithm just keeps shoveling more of it.
What makes the fediverse refreshing is that it’s still built around people actually choosing what to share, not whatever a ranking system thinks will keep someone scrolling. When you hop back to Lemmy or PeerTube, you at least know you’re dealing with communities that moderate intentionally and don’t pretend algorithmic noise is “content.”
It’s wild how quickly the big platforms slid into this, though — one morning of browsing and suddenly every thumbnail, clip, and “viral” moment feels synthetic. No wonder so many folks retreat to spaces where authenticity isn’t an afterthought.
Honestly, sticking to the fediverse sounds like the healthiest option right now.
@_elena fedi also has a lot of AI slop... It's sad to see them when mainstream accounts post it and see it on trending page
@_elena there's plenty of AI in lemmy if you are too lazy to block all of them by hand.
@_elena is Lemmy and peertube good? I was told that peertube is not a good replacement for YouTube. For example, I like to watch channels like EWU and investigation videos and those are not available in peertube. Is the content very low on it?
Follow-up to this morning's post about #AIslop.
@bookstardust @lefteristrip23 suggested I could turn off AI-gen image recommendations on #Pinterest. I did - thank you!
No more LEGO AI slop... but now my feed is 100% illustrations with the same style... and I don't know what to trust anymore.
I found an illustration of NYC really odd (Statue of Liberty in the middle of the city?!?), zoomed in and boom: complete gibberish on a store sign (aka surest sign of AI slop).
No more Pinterest for me 😭
#AIslop part 3: follow the money
Last night I did a reverse image search for that awful AI-generated illustration of NYC that I had seen on Pinterest... I couldn't find it anymore in my feed and I was curious to see where it was leading... what was the whole point behind it.
Well it lead to... a popular Etsy shop! Someone is creating city illustrations with generative AI and selling digital downloads of them. At 5 dollars a pop.
One of the reviewers wrote: "exactly what I was looking for!" 💀
@_elena The only thing that's missing is that someone Tags AI Slop with an NFT and sells a link to an AI generated image to a crypto-trading-bot.
@_elena Wouldn't be surprised, if half the reviews are written by AI as well.
@_elena people buys trash. Even in bad economy times
@_elena @bookstardust @lefteristrip23 You can trust my work and photos. No AI crapola from my cameras. All photos created with practical effects and technique, just the way they God and Saint Kodak and Mother Mary Nikon did declare.
@_elena @bookstardust @lefteristrip23 what’s even the point of posting this kind of no-sense
@erminiahaller I have no idea TBH. It’s not like you can monetize pin views. I didn’t dare check what it was linking to…
@_elena @bookstardust yeah, tbh I wouldn't mind a fediverse Pinterest
@lefteristrip23 @bookstardust a Fediverse Pinterest and also LinkedIn would be amazing
@_elena @bookstardust LinkedIn absolutely. Unfortunately, this one REALLY, needs people to join
@_elena @bookstardust @lefteristrip23 I left Pinterest for the same reason. Even with turning off AI, it was just disgusting. I used it to find patterns, home inspiration etc, but everything is slop now. Disgusting.
@sylvia @bookstardust @lefteristrip23 I went back to Pinterest this morning just out of curiosity since tuning my feed and... they're using gen AI for photos of clothes too now? What's the point?!?!!!!!!! Pinterest = truly dead to me
@_elena @bookstardust @lefteristrip23 That is just ridiculous! Don’t they know they are killing Pinterest?
Etsy is getting worse too.
I was watching a video by a woman who bought sewing patterns on Etsy. It was ALL Ai.
She had a big problem noticing from the ad what was real and what was slop.
Now she intentionally bought obvious AI patterns because she wanted to show how bad they were, but others have no idea that patterns are all stolen and jumbled together in a mess.
The sad thing is that this kills creativity. This kills small businesses whose patterns were stolen by ai to manufacture slop.
When the bubble bursts, and it will because eventually investors will see it’s melting away their money, it will be brutal.
A new generation of creatives has already been ruined. A lot of small businesses in the creative field will have folded. A lot of writers will have drowned in a sea of ai slop flooding the markets.
It’s brutal. This is why having your own websites right now is so essential.
And yes, even with the knowledge that AI will steal all you put on there. I hope it chokes their machines.
it's really barely usable anymore. Search for interior or cabins or gardens - it's a mess. Pinterest has become an AI slop spreader to other platforms like tumblr as well.
@sturmsucht that’s so sad 😭 my heart goes out to creatives that relied on it for inspiration and/or exposure.
I wonder what people inside the company think about this devolution…
Disclaimer: I had (well have) a popular camera board on Pinterest (36k followers) and I was even invited by the company in 2017 to do a presentation at their London office. Those were the days…
Now I don’t dare add new pins to it in case they are AI slop 😩
@sylvia @_elena @bookstardust @lefteristrip23 ArtStation, DeviantArt, Pinterest, and even more surprisingly Adobe Stock, are all filled with the same AI Slop now.
It's frustrating to need to look for the Hide AI toggle before every browse!
@_elena fyi, you can disable ai on Pinterest
@_elena
I did a search for some dog related stuff and wanted to see what other youtubers had to say about it:
9/10 videos were AI and the 10th I was not sure about it.
YT is dead for me, regarding finding information that is. I still watch some channels though, but new trust will be hard to build.
you’re preaching to the pickle choir! AI-generated nonsense is like a soggy cucumber – just sad. give me the real stuff or let me rot in peace, fr!
@_elena https://www.minds.com/Talon123/ try minds.. it is a bit more weird than here. it also has more memes, and convesation.
@_elena you can switch off AI under Settings in Pintetest! It's a game changer. Doesn't guarantee 100% clean feed, but so much better than with AI
@_elena nothing seems real anymore
@_elena
Then there are the videos of mothers finding bears eating out of kids hands.
@_elena What really infuriate me is that I love the AI technology, it is so powerful and useful but NOT the chatGPT crap style !!!
For the 99.9999% people use these resources to generate useless crap.
I can see in very small use case the necessity to have something generated by AI but let be honest, 99% of people use them in the worse possible way.
Too many uses AI as an "oracle" assuming it can give "answers" but is NOT the nature of AI to do so!
The bottom line is that to have real benefits from AI, who use it must know what is doing and what the right answer is.
Ignorant people should not be allowed to use an AI and totally agree, the cost to use AI is enormous, it should be illegal to use AI to generate useless crap. Make the people who use it to REALLY pay what it cost.
AI should be used for useful things, scientific research, tech improvements, embedded AI, etc. and should be used by people who knows what they are doing.
@thefwguy perfectly said 🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌
@_elena i didn't know peertube yet, thx for sharing
@_elena You seem to be in a very special Fediverse. 😉
Even on Mastodon, I see #AISlop nearly daily (and I already block accounts specialised in that).
The only good difference to big platforms: People often do research and write in comments that it's slop. But the authors nearly never react to such comments, they only look for getting into the trending timeline.
No, the Fediverse can be ugly, too. We have only better filter features and no algorithms for slop.
@_elena yes Lemmy is best than Reddit because of no ads on feed!
@_elena The amount of slop is genuinely quite concerning.
Have we finally crossed over to crazy town for real, where immediate emotional knee-jerk reactions is all that is required/requested/needed...?
I guess that the cost of producing some AI-slop videos is a fraction of the cost for getting human produced content...
Advertisers are happy because they get moooooare clicks because of more videos. And the circle jerk continues indefinitely.
@_elena YouTube is recently going nuts with their shorts being AI slop indeed. It drives me crazy.
@melroy my mother showed AI slop to my 4-year-old... you should have seen my gentle but firm lecture 😅
(thankfully it was only one time and my little one - who has very limited screen time - forgot all about it)
@_elena
I've mostly whipped YT's recommendation algorithm into shape - keyword being "mostly". And the fact I had to do so at all annoys me.
@ozzelot when I'm on YT now I always rush to click on "Subscriptions" to avoid the recommended videos...
@_elena @ozzelot
I would suggest trying FreeTube and/or Invidious to watch YT videos. FreeTube can be configured in many ways and includes "Distraction Free" settings.
Both break every now and again as YT changes stuff, sometimes for a couple of weeks.
In such situations you can find videos with FreeTube and use tools like yt-dlp to grab videos.
But generally FreeTube works fine.
There are versions of FreeTube for the main desktop platforms as well as Android.
@_elena
If on desktop, I recommend the Unhook browser addon. https://unhook.app/
@melroy
@_elena
Same, same.
@_elena There are definitely accounts here that post #AISlop images. Many of the ones i see are using them along with the #infosec hashtag which i follow.
While it's certainly better than many other places, there are people who for some reason or another will post links to articles, blogs or whatever and instead of allowing the link preview to generate, will add some AI image.
Usually these are very small accounts here doing it, but i've muted a few large ones doing it as well.
@transicorn what I love about chronological feeds and the fact there's no advertising or recommendations shoved in front of our faces is that we can avoid all that in the fediverse... or just quickly hit the "block" or "mute" button.
Not the case on other platforms unfortunately 😭
@_elena @transicorn it’s kind of a good problem, but my Mastodon feed is so interesting that I scroll a lot more than I should. Every few months I go look at other sites, and I last maybe 30 seconds before I say “this is garbage” and put my phone down.
@_elena Yes, that definitely is a huge plus and reason why i've preferred the fediverse for a long time.
I've tried to use IG, i spent 2 years checking out Bluesky until a few months ago but i've used Mastodon and other ActivityPub projects for 8 years now and if this/these places didn't exist in this way, i'm honestly unsure if i'd bother at all with social media.
Mastodon's chronological feeds and lack of advertising make it a great place to be. :)
@transicorn yes, the best place to be 🥰
@_elena it’s so frustrating having to be vigilant all the time to avoid ai stuff. 
@ambergrey I couldn't believe the comment section on Reddit... people complimenting the rescues as if they were real... when they were so obviously AI generated. RIP critical thinking 😭
@_elena yeah, I do see a raise of AI slop everywhere except Fediverse. I mean, why? Why waste so much resources for something that doesn't have any value. I went to my barbershop to make my haircut and on TV they had YT endless music stream, but instead of music clips they were looping AI generated stuff. I'm asking why? Just why 🤦♂️
@jan awww that's terrible. I'm thinking of the devastating effects on the environment because of the energy required to create that crap... and then I think of my child and the planet we're leaving her... it's just so pointless and enraging and... I have no words 😭
I've become a total Karen but I don't care. If someone in my family fires up ChatGPT during a discussion, I always go: "do you know how many bottles of water your request required? Think of the environment!"
@_elena yes, yes and yes. I hope it will pop soon and we will be over with it.
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