AI slop has given online misinformation a whole new dimension in which to operate in. Fake videos and fake pictures of fake people, made by stealing bits and pieces of real intellectual property to make a milkshake of faux human creativity masquerading as art. There’s this emerging idea of Dead Internet Theory, which basically claims that the internet will become so overloaded with automated bots, AI images, and garbage information that the utility of the internet will be significantly diminished. There may come a point where you no longer know whether what you’re looking at online is real or posted by a real person. There’s no way to mute AI slop from your social media feed, and why would there be? Meta and Twitter are both heavily invested in these technologies, even though they have failed to demonstrate any kind of upside that would make it worth all of these risks.
For our purposes today, we’re not going to cover the very obvious environmental risks posed by these AI technologies. We would be here for hours. The astonishing level of CO2 emissions created by these bumbling chat bots is reason enough to have this entire area of tech outlawed until they can demonstrate a more environmentally friendly way to function, but I digress.
The current applications of AI are completely backwards. The advocates for this tech are eager to outsource human creativity to the machine. Human beings should be the ones drawing ugly pictures, making bad songs, and writing annoying op-ed think pieces for failing publications. Why should you be the one working a menial job while the AI gets to make art? The AI, if it can be used for anything, should be used to take away menial work that humans don’t want to do, so we can be the ones free to paint, write, etc.
In 2023, Sports Illustrated was embroiled in an AI scandal where they were found to be using AI bots to generate articles for the magazine — with AI generated profile pictures and biographies for writers that didn’t exist. AI writing is pretty easy to clock. It is soulless and often confused. The kind of writing you would expect from a college freshman desperately trying to hit the minimum word count for an essay assignment that he or she put no real thought into. A friend of mine is a professor and they have told me multiple people in their classe\s have been caught this past semester trying to pass off obvious AI writing as their own for important class assignments.
The problem goes deeper than academic dishonesty. These practices have already permeated into the real world and have graver consequences than reading a fake article out of Sports Illustrated. United Healthcare, an insurance company that came under scrutiny after CEO Brian Thompson was assassinated in downtown Manhattan late last year, has been accused in multiple lawsuits dating back to 2023 of using AI models to approve or deny insurance claims without the input of a human being. You put in an insurance claim, it gets denied by an AI model, and you’re suddenly put on the back foot advocating for yourself to get the insurance company to hold up their end of the bargain. Most people get their health insurance through a job, you make your payments every month. For most people, the money comes straight out of your check and you don’t even think about it. But when you’re in your time of need, you have to be managing your own health while arguing on the phone with the same people that used an automated source code to deny your claim in the first place.
Healthcare aside, You don’t have to look very far to see how this technology is making people dumber. Just look at Twitter. Under every post you see users asking “@grok is this true?” If you’re unfamiliar with Grok, this is Twitter’s take on the AI chat bot. On Twitter, you can respond to a post of someone saying, “the earth is flat,” and ask in response “@Grok is this true?” Grok will reply to your post with the relevant information, usually this information comes from what appears to be the AI combing through basic Google results as if you submitted the same question into a search engine, and mixing an amalgamation of those results into an almost human like reply to your question. Instead of taking the minimal effort required to do a google search and figure out the truth on your own, we’re outsourcing our already diminishing brain power to Elon’s AI bot. The people relying on Grok think they’re appealing to a neutral authority that will tell them what to believe, when in reality these bots are just as manipulatable as the people designing them. Instead of doing a quick Google search, consulting an expert source, or thinking for yourself, the people captured by this technology are taking these chat bot responses as gospel. At a time where media literacy in America is at an all time low, outsourcing our own critical analysis to the machine so we never have to think for ourselves is incredibly dangerous.
When the machine is writing your work emails, class assignments, etc. your brain is not sharpening these mental skills it sorely needs to function in the real world. You begin to lose your humanity. In essence, they are trying to automate your critical thinking and reading comprehension. You can always have the machine do it for you. What could go wrong? Just have Grok read For Whom the Bell Tolls and write your five page essay for your college course and turn it in. Why does it matter when you’ll be using the same kind of tricks when you enter the workforce?
Meta has even floated the idea of AI friends. Mark Zuckerberg said in a recent interview with Dwarkesh Patel that the male loneliness epidemic could be salved with online AI friends. This is the final nail in the coffin. Using AI to cheat at school, your job, and finally, using AI bots in place of real human relationships. Your humanity is completely stripped from you and your social alienation under capitalism is complete in a way that wouldn’t have been possible just a couple years ago.
We need to stay connected with our humanity. We at Murder City encourage you to write, draw, sing, read, create in whatever way suits you best. Do your own research; write your own college essays. Don’t let the AI convince you to surrender the greatest parts of being a human.
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