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1 day agoMost corporate social media is already overrun with AI slop. Even Mastodon has too much slop for me. People don’t seem to mind as much as we do over here on the fediverse and even that is a gross generalization, because most people here don’t seem to mind it anywhere near as much as I do… They just are data center nimbys. So, my guess, to be honest, is people will just engage with it the same way they do with other content for 90% of people. Maybe 10% get disgusted and leave. The children pine for the crypto mines.
I think we could use that sort of curation on the fediverse. For me, even mastodon has too much slop. I even had to stop being involved in some lemmy communities because there was too much slop. I have a very low tolerance for this shit. I am at a point where I don’t even want to read books written after 2025 due to the propensity for publishers to be putting slop into books. A bunch of comments on here seem to end up equivocating and saying oh but AI is cool for this or that other thing… I don’t see a single area where my life has been improved by the slop. I feel more isolated from other people, I feel the quality of information dropping and the ability to find genuinely helpful information (which was my main use case for things like youtube and a lot of the internet at large) is being rapidly destroyed, I can’t trust news articles that generate slop images, so it’s become very hard to find reliable news about the world where that used to be easy… I just don’t see the upside at all. We are nuking the environment at record speed in order to have an idiot liar machine spew largely indecipherable drivel into every context of our lives. I think my options for maintaining my own sanity are now down to pursuing a fully off-grid hermit life for real, or probably become so isolated and miserable that I eventually kill myself… And I used to really enjoy the internet. I am starting to actually and viscerally hate it… Even a lot of the fediverse. I don’t see any upside. I think computers peaked as an extension of human abilities probably in the early 2000’s and since the migration to Meta and Google platforms it has regressed into a mirror of that time you would get a cd in the mail for 2000 free hours on AOL and it had some custom browser where half the screen was ads with just content in the middle, not unlike the movie idiocracy. Half the internet I can’t even see because of my ad blocker and the assistance that more and more of our lives be lived in our houses staring at screens, while the outside world is literally on fire, just seems to be an overpowering and dissonant note in the orchestra of our lives… Why anybody would want to live like this I can’t imagine… And everybody wanting to live like this makes me feel like there is a huge gulf between myself and the rest of humanity that I am not sure I have the energy to try to cross anymore. I can’t seem to find the ability to equivocate on this like others have and say, but AI makes this or that better… AI makes it easier for people to be lazy about certain things, which is also bad. I am anti-work and would love for people to live a life filled with enjoyment and leisure, but that’s not what AI brings to the table. Anybody using it so they can be intellectually lazy is inherently destroying their own problem solving skills in whatever parts of their lives where they haven’t already done so. We work harder now than we ever did before, with AI assisting us and there is no sign of that trend abating… All it’s done by preying on intellectual laziness has been to remove even more of our leisure time and turn us into people incapable of solving problems for ourselves and embed us in a life of meaningless toil towards pointless goals that seem further and further from solving the problems of the world, many of which are being caused exclusively or at least exacerbated by AI. So personally I would prefer useful toil to the endless and meaningless life of toil created by our co-existence with AI slop.