Why internet searches are serving up 'AI slop'

[usonian]

RNZ
24 August 2024
emphasis mine

Danyl McLauchlan, author and IT systems consultant at Victoria University of Wellington's School of Biological Sciences, said science fiction has foretold what happens when such content is left to spread unchecked.

"Neal Stephenson… describes nations in the future as having been 'Facebooked', which is… that kind of phenomenon of being completely swamped by meaningless gibberish," he told RNZ's Saturday Morning.

Stephenson coined the phrase 'metaverse' in 1992's Snow Crash, which directly inspired the name of Facebook's parent company, Meta - which has poured billions of dollars into creating the kind of virtual reality Stephenson wrote about in his dystopic novel. Facebook has in the past been accused of creating algorithmic 'echo chambers', in which people are served up engaging content which might differ completely from what others are seeing.

"There is no coherent media or what he calls 'consensual reality'," McLauchlan said. "No one agrees on what basically is happening in the country because everyone is getting different algorithmically sort of news feeds. "And so the nation collapses, because you do need that kind of consensual reality to even argue meaningfully about what's going on and what should happen."

Hmmmm, know anyone whose goal is national collapse?

Description of fake books on Amazon and how Google summaries are trashing news sites' revenue at the link.

Here:
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/526067/why-internet-searches-are-serving-up-ai-slop