The heartbreaking videos and images from the ongoing fires in Los Angeles are filling up social media. A number of them are claiming to show the iconic Hollywood Sign on fire last night.
Earlier this year, a bunch of videos went viral showing the Hollywood Sign on fire.
Literally like the Hollywood Sign, it was burning, it was burning yesterday, burning like what is going on?
It looked like the apocalypse.
They were posted in January when fires were raging across LA where I live. This was a scary time and those videos only made things worse.
These viral images that we see of the Hollywood Sign on fire actually started to spread on social media as Los Angeles in battles one of its worst fires in all of its history.
There were different versions. Some of the videos just showed fire on the hill low the letters, and in other videos the letters themselves were burning.
When we saw the posts on Instagram, we were devastated. We lived here all our lives and when we saw that on Instagram, that broke our hearts. So we wanted to come and see for as time, and we're really shocked that the there's no fires, there's no fires, and they're taking it basically.
So those videos were all fake. They were generated by AI. If you saw these videos when they first came out, maybe you already knew they were fake. But what you might not know is how much money these videos can make for their creators. And if the online course that teaches you how to make these videos is to be believed, you can make over five thousand dollars a month. Videos like the Hollywood Sign burning are part of a bigger phenomenon that is probably filling up your feed right now.
There's a word for this slap.
I actually don't know where it came from. Like I had been calling it AI spam, I was writing about it before it was called AI, and then someone on Twitter I think, could just start calling it slop, and I feel like slop is a better term for it. There's a lot of different types of AI slop at this point, but basically it is an AI generated image or video that is designed to go viral on social media.
Jason Kevler is my friend and former colleague from back when we both worked advice. Since then, he co founded a site called four or for Media, and pretty much right out the gate this stuff turned into one of his beats. You're one of the first people who was really documenting AI slap before it really truly blew up.
Yeah, I mean I'm obsessed with it. I've been obsessed with it since the get go. I've just found it to be like very fascinating to cover because I can kind of like watch in real time as people lose touch with reality. To be honest with you.
I don't know if I'm quite as obsessed with with this stuff as Jason is. But then again, he was looking at golden Jesus helicopters and I'm here looking at fake fires. But when I started investigating, I realized that the stuff that he was seeing and the stuff that I was watching, we're all part of the same machine. And I managed to talk to one of the people behind it. I'm afraid from Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is kill Switch. I'm Dexter Thomas, I'm Chari.
Buy.
When did you start writing about AI slab?
Yeah, it was December twenty twenty three. One of our readers posted this image of a guy in the United Kingdom who carves dogs out of wood like with a chainsaw, and this reader had noticed that there were all these copycats of this one guy's dog wood carvings. Basically, there were these Facebook pages that were posting dozens and dozens of different versions of the original photos that he was uploading. And so in some images it's like the guy would
be would have a goatee. In some images, the guy would look Latino. In some images, the guy would be a woman. In some images, the dog would be a German shepherd instead of like, you know, a Golden Retriever. And it was very obvious that they had been modified by AI.
This stuff sounds pretty innocuous, and I guess it was. Back in twenty twenty three. Image to image generators like Dolly and Microsoft's Being Image Generator were still kind of novel, and if someone wanted to use that to make variations on existing images of chainsaw wood carvings, I mean, that's not really my thing, but hey, if people are into it, whatever. It was just kind of a.
Lot at first. This meant a lot of people were using these aiimage generators and they were creating Facebook pages and then posting I don't know, twenty thirty forty times a day, and each page would have a theme. So one of the themes would be like beautiful log cabins. So a person would generate one hundred log cabins using these aiimage generators and then they would post them on Facebook.
But his AI tools got better, and these Facebook pages became more viral, the AI slap became more targeted and weirder.
The moment that this became really mainstream, in my opinion, was this moment of shrimp Jesus and shrimp Jesus. Oh we go right in Jesus, I mean, I think so. So for a while, there were all of these images of Jesus, this sort of stereotypical white Jesus, long hair, and people were just posting hundreds of images of Jesus in different situations and then the caption would say please give me an amen. They would be asking people to comment on this, which would boost in the algorithm, and
none of it was real. It was all AI generated. There was a lot of images of Jesus sand sculptures, and then the caption would be like only true believers will love my art or something like that. And then there was this one image where Jesus was floating above the ocean and he had the face of Jesus but the arms of shrimp. It was basically like an iracnid Jesus with like six arms and they were all made
of shrimp. And it was just like obviously insane, like an insane image, something that a human I don't think would probably ever think up on their own. And this image had millions of likes on Facebook, and there were a bunch of different versions of it. It just went incredibly viral and weirdly, like a lot of the comments were not even about the fact that Jesus was a shrimp.
It was just like, amen, I love God, things like that, and so, I mean, I don't think people thought it was real, but it clearly didn't matter to a lot of people that this was just like an absurd image.
It sounds like shrimp Jesus was kind of the turning point for Ais. I don't want to say the genesis necessarily, I don't want to get too biblical with this, but when I read your article on shrimp Jesus, I think that is when I really truly realized, Okay, something really really strange is happening here.
Yeah, it was very interesting that this was happening on Facebook. First, like, Facebook is a really old social network at this point, it's not cool anymore. Like, I don't know a lot of people who use Facebook in the same way that they might have in like two thousand and eight, and the people that I do know who use it are generally older and therefore, I mean, perhaps more susceptible to
fake AI images. And then I wrote that article, and there was also some different meme accounts on Instagram and on Twitter who took screenshots of shrimp Jesus, and they started saying Facebook is cooked. Facebook is became a meme meaning look at what's happening over on Facebook. All the old people are getting tricked into liking this absurd stuff. And so that is a moment where AI slop escaped Facebook.
Shrimp Jesus went viral in April of twenty twenty four. At the time, I remember thinking it was pretty funny. I actually interviewed Jason about it and we basically spent half an hour just laughing. But now, just a year later, AI slap isn't only on Facebook tricking our parents. It's everywhere, and it's not just bizarre or obviously fake stuff like shrimp Jesus anymore. Some of those fake la fire videos looked real, and they fooled a lot of people, so.
Which came right here just to check out the fires, and there's nothing burnie in Hollywood.
The sign like you was shown on TV last night.
You guys should help each other out instead of trying to create false narratives and trying to promote bus, you know, help help each other out. It's not it's not it's not right.
This is the latest iteration of AI content, more realistic, more targeted, and tied to real world events.
That's the scary thing about it, right, is that when I first started writing about this, there was almost nothing that was political or tied to the news in any way. It was almost all like, look at this crazy food, look at this amazing futuristic sci fi scenescape, look at shrimp Jesus, look at this sand sculpture. And then what has happened is the people making this stuff have realized that they can get more attention if they start tying it to the news in some way.
So one night, as the fires were still burning in La, I opened up Instagram, and this was kind of everyone's way of communicating, and it was also kind of a lifeline. When you look at someone's stories, you never knew if it was going to be them saying, hey, I'm okay, I'm safe, or if it was going to be them showing their house burning down. So I'm scrolling through and I see this video of animals that are in a
burning forest and there's firefighters saving the baby animals. There's a firefighter holding these two baby bear cubs and carrying them out of the flames. Pretty quickly, I realized, wait a second, this is fake. And then I look at the view count. It's in the millions and there's thousands of comments. I get curious and I look at the
username future rider US. That's kind of weird. So I look at the post history, and most of the posts were of these AI motorcycles that were riding through futuristic landscapes, so the name makes sense for those. But I scroll up and I see that as soon who as the fire started, they posted a fake Hollywood sign burning video that got them a million views, and that was their biggest success to that point, and they just kept posting fire content after that.
The thing that's happened alongside of that is the AI has gotten a lot better. The AI has gotten a lot more convincing.
I said, I was able to tell this it's fake, but it took me a second. And the comments are kind of mixed. There's some people who are completely unaware that this stuff is fake and saying things like, Wow, look at these brave firefighters. I'm so glad they're helping the animals. But there's other people who are posting angry comments like how dare you make fake content about this disaster?
And so now you have a lot of people who are making stuff that is designed to hit the news cycle in some way, to upset people, to enrage people, or to trick them. It's not just on face Book. It's on YouTube, it's on TikTok, It's on Instagram. You know, I've even seen it on Pinterest and LinkedIn. So it's really become a strategy for people who want to make money on the internet at this point.
Yeah, it's weird because it seemed like everything trickled down to Facebook in the past few years. Good features from somewhere else eventually make it over to Facebook. Information that first happens on Twitter, because it's really real time, eventually makes it over to Facebook. It's not like this really weird thing that has started on Facebook is spread out to the rest of the world.
It's the first time Facebook's irrelevant in like a decade.
This is the innovation that's happening on Facebook. No joke. Yeah is aislab. But when was it that you first started seeing stuff that was realistic and was directly tied to actual events that were happening in the real world.
There was this moment where in Israel's invasion of Gaza, there was that moment where they went into Rafa and there was an AI generated image called all Eyes on Rafa.
Can you describe the image?
Yeah, So it was huge font and it said all eyes on Rafa. There was like a bunch of tents and what looked to be like a refugee camp. And this was shared like tens of millions of times on Instagram. A lot of celebrities shared it. There was a bunch
of people writing about it. So I started looking for where it came from, and I found this group on Facebook for AI creators in Malaysia and they were testing all of these different versions of AI generated images about the war in Gaza, and the all Eyes on Rafa
image came from that Facebook group. So that was the first time that I ever saw AI spam intersect directly with the news, and it was interesting because in that group they were talking about the all eyes on Rafa image and how viral it went, and we're like, maybe we can reverse engineer this, maybe we can do this over and over and over again. A month after that, I figured out how people were making money with these images and why and the whole strategy behind it.
Who's behind these posts and how do they make money. We'll get into that after the break. One of the disconnects that I've been seeing just in my own reporting is that I think there is an awareness growing among some people that AI generated images are a thing, and that it's not always obvious if something is AI. But I think a lot of people don't necessarily realize why this is being made, what motivation there might be.
For a very long time. I and also the experts that I spoke to, One thing that we couldn't figure out was like, why are they doing this? Like what is the scam here? Because there was no obvious way that it was being monetized. For months, I thought that people were doing this and trying to make money off of Facebook's platform in some way. I thought they were trying to hack people I thought they were trying to push them off the website to steal their credit card
information or something like that. But all along they were just getting paid directly by Facebook because these images were going viral.
These creators don't need to scam anybody. Having a viral video is enough to make a lot of money.
Facebook has this thing called the Creator Bonus Program, and it basically pays people a sliver of ad revenue for posts that get engagement.
How much money can you make? Meta doesn't publish those numbers, but I asked a few influencers and recently the rate seemed to be around one hundred to one hundred and twenty dollars per million views.
It's become a job to be totally honest with you. It's pretty crazy because there's there's like this one example of a guy who quit his job in India. He was like working in the medical industry and he wasn't making a lot of money and he was supporting his family and he was like, I used to work like sixteen hour days and then I learned about spamming Facebook. And he posted this one image that was a train made out of leaves. It's like just to passenger train,
but the train was made entirely out of leaves. It was an AI image and he made four hundred dollars from that image. And he was like, I was only making two hundred dollars a month at my other job. Wow, And so I just do this now.
Wow. And there's the incentive. You can make pretty serious money here, which brings us back to future writer us. It's not really possible to know exactly how much money they're making, but if we go back to that estimate of about one hundred bucks per million views, let's compare that to their most successful day. In a roughly twenty four hour stretch, starting on January tenth, they posted seven
videos which collectively got about ninety four million views. Theoretically, that could work out to nine thousand, four hundred dollars in one day. And that's not the only way the account makes money. They also sell a guide so that you yourself can start your own AI slaw business for just nineteen ninety nine.
Want to grow your Instagram TikTok YouTube fast, get thousands of followers, create viral reels, and earn five thousand dollars plus every month with the Viral Reels Guide it's easier than ever. Step by step instructions, proven strategies, the perfect for beginners, no experience needed, Ready to start. Grab the guide today for just nineteen dollars and ninety nine cents.
This is a key part of the new AI slop economy.
So there is this entire network of influencers. Almost all of them are in India, Vietnam, Pakistan, a couple in a few African countries and Central America, but for the most part they are in developing countries who have YouTube channels, who are like, here is how you can make AI spam, and here's how to put it on Facebook, and here's how to mind to ties it.
So as I went further down this Future writer us rabbit hole, I got so curious that I realized I needed to know what was in this course they were selling, So for journalism's sake, I bought it. It's a ZIP file with two files. The first one is this really short PDF which is pretty clearly chat GBT generated, and the summary of it is it basically gives you these instructions.
First look online for what's already trending at the moment. Second, type that into Sora dot Ai to generate a video about that thing, add some music, and three posts a video online. Then just repeat that multiple times a day. The second file is just a seven minute iPhone screen recording of them generating a prompt and then uploading that online.
It's like almost like a pyramid scheme where it's like, well, well, this one person made a lot of money and here's a guide to doing it, so I'm gonna try as well. You just have like tens of thousands of people who are trying this, and the end result is the entire platform gets spammed.
So who's the audience for this stuff?
I mean, there's definitely some strategic thinking about will people in the United States, the United Kingdom or Canada care about this stuff? That's the strategy. And I know that's the strategy because a lot of the videos about how to make this stuff talk about here's what people in the United States care about. Like I watched one video that basically was like Americans love babies and they love pets,
and so make AI images about babies and pets. I've seen guides that are like, here's what you need to know about Jesus because you may be Hindu and you don't know so like, if you're making AI spam about Jesus, here are words to type in that will get you Jesus.
Because a lot of Americans are Christian. You want people in the United States and Canada to look at these because the way that online advertising works is if you are in a richer country, the ad rates are higher, page views from developed countries.
Are worth more.
Yeah, but I think the audience is an algorithm. I think that the audience is like what what works well in the algorithm, because the goal is not to create an amazing image or an amazing video that people are going to resonate with. The goal is to make people linger on any given image or video long enough to send a signal to the algorithm that this is something that a human being spent time looking at, spend time
engaging with. You know, if it's something totally absurd, you're going to get people in the comment saying, hey, this isn't real, and then you're going to have fights back and forth, and all of those signals send to the algorithm that this is something that's worth surfacing in someone else's feed. And so I really don't think that the audience for this is real human beings.
You might have heard that last bit and thought of something called the dead Internet theory. It's well, you could kind of call it a conspiracy theory, but basically it refers to the idea that the Internet has so many bots and algorithmically generated content that human interaction is actually a minority of the traffic online. The majority of traffic is just bots spamming each other back and forth.
And the way that you would apply this to say, shrimp Jesus, for example, is like, well, there's a bot that posted this AI image, and then maybe all the people liking at our bots, and maybe all the people commenting on it our bots, and therefore none of it is real.
But Jason has a slightly different theory.
I think that's too reductive. I just I don't think that that's what's happening, and I know that's not what's happening, because there are human beings in the loop. I'm certain of it. Like they're human beings who are prompting these AI images and are posting them. They may not be monitoring the accounts very closely, but they're making it and they're posting these images. And then there are definitely bots who are liking and commenting on some of these images.
But these images and these photos and these you know, videos are showing up in people's feeds. So I've called the zombie Internet, where it's like a mix of human beings and bots, where you have human beings arguing in the comments with bots. You have human beings in the comments arguing with other human beings. You have bots in
the comments arguing with other bots. And it's to me, that's even worse than dead Internet, where everyone is a bot, because you have all of these real humans who can't tell that they're commenting on an AI generated image and they're arguing about it, and they're spending tons of time, like tons of like you know, human hours, engaging with it.
Yeah, like we're humans are moving amongst the dead, and you end up with something that's only kind of half alive and half dead and somewhere in the middle there. So, while humans might not be the target audience for these images and videos, real people are being fed this content and you'd think that that would piss them off, but we're starting to find out that that's not necessarily the case.
So there was a Hurricane Helene that hit you know, North Carolina, Georgia the southeast and in the aftermath that there were a lot of horrible images coming out of it, has come out of any natural disaster, and there was an AI generated image of a three year old girl crying and I think she was like sitting on a raft or you know, there was like a flood around her.
And this image is very clearly AI generated, but it went really viral and it was shared by a few Republican politicians and they were sort of talking about how this is what FEMA and Joe Biden's poor response to the hurricane has done to people, right and there was a moment where everyone was like, this is fake, You're stupid, And the response from the politicians were like, I don't care if it's real or not. Something like this is happening there.
Yeah, I mean, I'll even read it here. This is Amy Kramer, the National Committee woman for the Republican National Convention, said, I'm reading this verbatim. There are people going through much worse than what is shown in this pic. So I'm leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and
pain people are living through right now. That is something that I've seen a lot when I look at the comment sections of fake AI generated images that are related to something that's actually happening in the real world, you'll see people in the comments who were, I think, in their own way, trying to make the Internet a better place by telling people, hey, this is fake and trying to educate people. And then some of those responses though,
are well, I don't care if this is fake. It doesn't matter because I'm sure something like this is happening. This is just a depiction of it. Yeah, that I find really interesting.
It's really interesting, and I'll tell you like I used to be more optimistic that social media can be fixed and like her information ecosystems can be fixed and things like that, and a lot of my first articles about this were about people can't tell that they're not real, and therefore it's bad that people can't tell that it's not real. And now it's a mix of people not being able to tell that these things are not real
and people not caring that they're not real. And the second one is almost worse, where you know it's fake, but you share it anyway because it captures some sort of vibe, like if it verifies their worldview, then it's useful to them in some way. Making it very unclear what is real and what is fake is part of the point of that entire project, where the truth is unknowable.
What are social media platforms doing about this? And is there anything that we can do about it? That's after the break, So this is where I have to ask about what the platforms are doing, because this sounds like it would make the experience really not fun. You get on Facebook, you get on Instagram, you get on TikTok, and everything is fake. Platforms can't possibly want this. So you've talked to platforms, what's been the responsive places, especially like Facebook.
Yeah, they don't care, like they like it, and I know that they like it because Mark Zuckerberg has talked about it in quarterly earnings reports Q three of last year.
Another part that I haven't talked about quite as much yet is the opportunity for AI to help people create content. And I think we're going to add a whole new category of content, which is AI generated or AI summarized content. And I think that that's going to be just very exciting for the for Facebook and Instagram and maybe threads or other kind of feed experiences over time, and.
I've also talked to Facebook comms people and said, like, do you want this type of stuff on your platform? Are you going to delete it? And you know, they will delete some of the really grotesque things if it violates other parts of their content policies, but they will not delete anything just because it is AI generated or because it's spam. And at the same time, Meta is developing its own artificial intelligence. You can make AI slop for lack of a better term, using Meta's own tools
and then post it to Facebook. And then most recently that they said, you know, we're going to hopefully create tools that will allow users to make their own AI generated profiles of fake people. And we imagine a future where like a lot of the content on these platforms is generated by AI.
Jason, why like this seems like a bad All this stuff seems bad.
Yeah, I've tried to figure out exactly why this is happening, Like I've tried to put myself in Mark Zuckerberg's shoes and be like, Okay, what is like the bullish argument here? And so one, it's like they're spending billions and billions of dollars on AI data centers, so they need to push this on people because they think that artificial intelligence is the future of work, it's the future of the Internet, it's the future of humanity, and so they are desperate
to find use cases for this in some way. The other thing that I've been thinking about is that the way that all of Meta's platforms work is it tries to learn as much about you as possible so that you stay on their platforms as long as possible so
that they can deliver targeted ads to you. And right now they have billions of people posting on their platforms all sorts of different types of content, and then they need to rely on their algorithm to categorize that content in some way and deliver it to people who they think will like it. And what I think is happening here is they want to use artificial intelligence to create hyper specific types of content so that you get on
their platforms and you don't stop scrolling. It's like, if you are really into, like a specific type of sports car and you only want to see like amazing videos of that sports car driving around, there might not be human beings creating enough of that content to like satisfy
you and keep you on that platform. Long enough, Whereas with artificial intelligence, they can just make millions of different variations of the specific thing that you're into, feed it to you over and over and over again, and then you know, target you even more close to with ads and keep you on the platform longer. They want to trap people into like even more specific algorithmic silos where hyper specific, artificially intelligent content is fed to you endlessly.
Which brings us back to our guy or gal. I actually don't know, future writer us. I'd seen all these angry comments in their posts, and I decided I just needed to see what the person behind the account was thinking, so I DM them. They told me they were Russian, and at first they were mostly bragging about how many views they were getting. But when I pointed out that a lot of people were either angry about their posts or had no idea that it was fake, they started
getting defensive. Future writer us said that they didn't see the problem because they'd added an AI tag to their videos, and well, they have a point. Instagram does have a feature that allows uploaders to voluntarily tag their posts as
AI generated. The trouble is that this label doesn't show up when you're watching the video Normally, you only see it if you look at the bottom and there's a C more tag and you tap that, and even then space is prioritized for the song title, so sometimes that tag is pushed off the screen and all it says is AI info in small text in the bottom right, and if you tap that, it shows you some more information AI info, not AI warning, not AI caution, just
AI info. Why would you ever tap that? Meta has a page on their site that makes a big deal about the introduction of this tag, and they primarily show what it looks like in the grid view. The issue is that it's even more imperceptible there. So when you first look at a post and the grid, you see the location tag, then you see the music title, and that scrolls in a view for a few moments. Only
after that does the text AI info appear. By that you're watching the video, you're not looking at tiny text rolls in the upper corner of your screen. And also, Meta never notified users that they were rolling this feature out.
Why would anyone know that this exists? And by the way, I did reach out to Meta when I was first reporting on this, and I asked them about their policy on AI on their platform, specifically, if there's any obligation for a user to more clearly label a post as AI other than that small badge, or why the desktop doesn't show the badge at all. They never responded, and this is where I have to kind of agree with
Future writer us. They said that if people don't notice the interfaces AI tag, it's not the poster's fault, it's Instagram's, and it's the platform's responsibility to make those tags bigger or more noticeable. That doesn't seem to be happening, and since both the AI slot posters and the platforms are making money, there's no real incentive for anyone to stop. But it does get weird when this stuff is happening
in a place that you live. You've been reporting on AI slap a lot, and I'm sure that when you saw the Hollywood sign thing on fire, youknew exactly what that was. Was there anything about the AI generated slap that was coming from the LA fires that was surprising to you?
I wasn't surprised that it happened, like I wasn't surprised that people were making slop about it. I was surprised that it upset me, like I was surprised, as someone who lives in Los Angeles, who knows people who lost their homes, who saw the fires like you know, the first day as they were growing. I was surprised that I was upset that this was happening and that people
were making money off of it. And I think I was also upset because there were some really brave journalists from the LA Times, New York Times, a lot of local spots who were going there take photos, taking videos, risking their lives to share this stuff. And then many of the images and videos that were going really viral
were just like the Hollywood Sign is on fire. And I was surprised because it was like the first time that aislop had impacted anything that had any personal meaning to me, and I found it to be like pretty upsetting.
It's interesting that you say that about people risking their lives because the creator, when people started calling them out a lot on their most viral reel, they posted a response and they say, I'm Marita here. In this video, I aimed to shed light on the reality of what's happening. The problems are very real. Animals are dying, homes are being destroyed, and firefighters are risking their lives to save others. They don't have the time to produce visually stunning and
powerful footage to raise awareness about these issues. That's why I took the initiative to create something that could help people see and truly think about these tragedies. So basically, people are risking their lives, they don't have time to make these really well produced things, so I made this for you. Which, of course, this all breaks down when right after the fires stop being in the news as much, they go on to making completely other unrelated AI generated content.
I find it to be offensive more or less. It's just like it's I think it's kind of tasteless. I don't think that that matters anymore on the Internet. But you know, there were plenty of images coming out of the La Fires, and we don't need an unlimited, infinite visual gallery of everything that is happening. And I think that's one of the biggest problems with AI slot more generally, is that you can find any news that you want, anything that confirms your worldview because of and because of
social media. So it's like, if you think that the La fires was an act of God punishing gay people in Los Angeles, which I've seen AI videos where that's what they're about, Like God is striking back against Hollywood's gay people. There's a video for you. If you think that it was like a space laser, there's a video for you. Like if you think that it was just like climate change, there's a video for you. If you only care about the animals that lost their homes, like, there's a video for you.
Yeah, it just feels like something we're gonna see more and more. You know, every time there's some new advancement or some new engine has dropped, some new you know, AI technology is dropped, people look at it, and the really excited people will post, oh my gosh, look at this and just think we're able to accomplish this today. But this is the worst it'll ever be. What does that mean for the future of AI slop and the future of how we're going to experience reality on the internet.
Yeah, So two things. One that's absolutely correct. It's like I've watched this stuff evolve in real time, and AI generated videos especially have gotten far more realistic in the last month and way way way better than they were a year ago. And two the people were saying, like we can use artificial intelligence to improve special effects for Hollywood, to improve productivity for you know, writers or whatever like that.
All the productivity gains that are going to happen in sort of like a best case use of artificial intelligence, that very well might be true. But alongside of that, you're going to have so many more people using these tools to spam the Internet, to abuse people, to make deep fakes of you know, celebrities and people that they
know in high school and things like that. And when you're just like using the Internet as a consumer like that, that's a lot of what you're going to experience because there's a lot more people trying to make a few bucks on Facebook than there are Hollywood studios that are trying to make like a triple A film.
So one last thing before I let Jason go, I asked if he could read me this one paragraph from his shrimp Jesus article, and hopefully it'll make sense why I.
Asked, there are AI generated pages full of AI deformed women, breastfeeding tiny cows, celebrities with amputations that they do not have in real life. Jesus as a shrimp, Jesus as a collection of Phanto bottles, Jesus as sand sculpture, Jesus as a series of ramen noodles, Jesus as a shrimp mixed with sprite bottles and ramen noodles. Jesus made a plastic bottles and posing with large breasted AI generated female soldiers.
Jesus on a plane with AI generated sexy fe flight attendants, giant gold Jesus being evacuated from a river, golden helicopter, Jesus banana, Jesus coffee, Jesus goldfish, Jesus rice Jesus, any number of AI generated female soldiers on a page called beautiful Military, a page called everything skull, which is exactly what it sounds like. Malnourished dogs, indigenous identity pages, beautiful landscapes,
flower arrangements, weird cakes, et cetera. I should write like that more often, where it's just like, here's a bunch of shit I saw.
I mean, just the breadth and the absolute unhinged quality of it. I think it gives. It's a wild snapshot of where we were. What is this last year? That was the state of Ai back then was slop, was kind of funny, and now not that long long after this, we're now in the zone where aislop is being used to make people afraid. It's being used to make people think the things that are happening that are obviously not happening.
And this is affecting people who otherwise think that they're very smart and informed and engaged and knowledgeable about the world. So we've made a jump, a really quick jump from Hahaha, isn't this funny all of us smart nerds on the internet get to laugh at our parents' generation to wait a second, this is affecting stuff that's affecting our perception of a literal natural disaster that happened where you and I live.
Yeah, I mean almost everything is trying to scare people. It's trying to talk about the news, it's trying to confuse people. And yeah, there's definitely a part of me where I'm like, can we go back to Jesus with the hot flight tence? Like what are we doing here?
And here we are?
Yeah, And like I feel like I can still generally tell what's AI generated and what's not, but I'm using like way more of my brain power like to try to decipher what's real and what's not because it is getting way better.
Thank you so much for listening to kill Switch and let us know what you think. If there's something we want us to cover, let us know that too. You can hit us at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC, or you can find me at dex Digi on the Gram or Blue Sky if that's more your flavor. And also if you can leave us a review, it helps other people find the show, which helps us keep doing our thing. This show is hosted by me Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Seno Ozaki, Darluk Potts, and Kate Osborne.
The theme song is by Kyle Murdoch, who also mixed the show from Kaleidoscope Or execut Native producers are Oz Valascian on Guest, Kaki Kadur, and Kate Osbourne from iHeart Our Executive producers are Katrina Norbl and Nikki E. Tor See. All in the next one h