‘AI-Pulp’ makes the internet even more messier

Search at Google on images of a ‘Beautiful Girl’, and the first women you will see have been generated by AI. Scroll by Facebook and sooner or later you will come across strange images of animals consisting of croissants or a woman who has received a twelve -fling. And on Tiktok you can shiver at AI movies in which ‘deformed’ people are exhibited.

In English this phenomenon is known as Ai slopfreely translated: ai-pulp. Where art and media that can be made with AI in a responsible and transparent way, AI-Pulp is in principle undesirable. It misleads, irritates or arouses revulsion.

And can also be harmful, says Siri Beerends, AI researcher at the University of Twente and the technology-critical collective Setup. For example, the AI ​​women that you will find on Google Puntchaaf are tailored to classic beauty ideals: light skin, slim, big eyes. AI tools such as Midjourney and Chatgpt are trained with (Western) training dates and make it socially desirable ‘unity sausage’, says Beerends. “The polished aesthetics that characterizes generative AI is your view of reality. Compare it to how young people who have seen a lot of porn no longer know what normal genitals look like. “

Distortion

Destruction of reality is a common thread at AI-Pulp. For example, a photo of a colorful, shiny peacock chicken went viral, while that in real life very normal are gray -brown. A fictional restaurant that posts ai -generated dishes – a shoe from Croissantdeeg, someone? -Collected 113,000 Instagram followers. Even more surreal are the shrimp consisting Jesus figures Who went viral on Facebook last year. Pages that attract attention with AI-Pulp earn money by forwarding visitors to clickbaits sites full of advertisements, or to shadowy web shops in which the images of the products offered are generated with AI, and so it is whether you receive something and how That looks then.

In addition to earning it, AI-Pulp is also used to influence the user, says Felienne Hermans, professor of subject didactics of computer science at the VU University. Think of ai -generated, stereotyping images of asylum seekers. “With every story we want to tell, we can now make a picture that supports this story. If you see it instead of reading alone, something will be the same ‘how’. ” That makes internet use tiring, says Hermans. “The fact that you have to doubt everything is a major burden.”

Different than spam

Is it not all times that the internet is plagued by unwanted or low-quality content, from photos-tucked photos to kitschy homepages full of glitter-blinking gifs? “The new AI is the scale and the ease with which you can make it. Not everyone can photoshopping and if you can do it, you can’t make thousands of images one day, “says Hermans. On the other hand, everyone can handle simple and free to use programs such as Chatgpt.

“In the past there was of course a lot of internet rumble,” adds Beerends. “Think of people who wrote very long, boring blogs about what they experienced.” But it was made by people, and showed something of human diversity, something of us. It was of low quality, but with generative AI everything gets the same low quality. “

Pulp with attraction

What is for one pulp hangs above the couch with the other. On the Marktplaats-like website Etsy, someone sells posters with by AI-generated animals On pocket size: from an elephant that fits in a palm to an Axolotl that holds a parasol. Unheimically in all its unrealistic cute – Yet about two thousand posters have already been sold.

And AI women may be fata morganas, for some users it seems precisely the attraction. On members’ platforms such as ONLYFANS, AI nude models for a few euros reveal their bodies generated by the computer with curves that even pornstars cannot match.

Seen in this way, generative AI holds us a mirror like people, says Beerends. “What AI images look like reflects our dominant culture, in which we like to retouch the imperfections.”

Big Tech

AI-Pulp gets a wide job on social media such as Facebook and Instagram. CEO Mark Zuckerberg strive With its platforms to a “whole new category of content, generated or summarized by AI.” Zuckerberg is a big fan of AI and lick One of loaves made horse on a Facebook page that specializes in AI-Pulp. Tech website 404Media discovered that this page also spread images of mutated children with more than a million followers. Scientific research showed that Facebook’s algorithms actively ‘recommend’ these types of pages to users. Tap AI images around From deformed people who are exhibited as attraction. The videos get thousands of likes – although the question is to what extent those from AI generated profiles come.

Professor Hermans does not surprise that AI-Pulp thrives on social media. “Facebook doesn’t want to make a good product – Facebook wants to make something that you get addicted to. Their only parameter is how much time you spend. ” Whether AI-pulp is stylized and cute or repulsive: as long as it is striking the user to his screen, tech platforms can show those more advertisements. AI-Pulp must therefore be understood by an economic lens, says Hermans. “It is part of the attention economy. If you have ten weblogs write by Chatgpt, you will get more clicks than if you work on an in -depth article for three months. ”

Turn

Siri Beerends thinks that the annoyance about AI-Pulp can cause a change in thinking about AI. “I recently saw an advertising agency advertising with: We don’t use AI. And someone who wrote above his LinkedIn contribution: “I wrote this text myself.” There is a certain irritation. “

This irritation can increase if the output of AI models gets worse. These models are trained with public data. If there is more and more pulp in between, the quality of the output is also lower: a vicious circle.

How we think about technology is constantly changing, says Beerends. “Previously you were a crazy if you were not on social media. Now it is about social media in terms of polarization, addiction, that it is ‘toxic’. I am curious if we will also think about generative AI more and more negatively. ”