"quantity-over-quality" sounds like the generic motto everything is following these days. *sigh*

> Its podcasting network Quiet Please has generated 12 million lifetime episode downloads and amassed 400,000 subscribers -- so, yes, people are really listening to AI podcasts

But how many of the episode downloaders are bots (like the voices in the podcasts)?

Pretty sure this is all inflated in preparation for some future IPO. We'll heard about a Theranos-like scandal in the near future.

to bury anything of value in immense piles of AI slop.

Can we please have a new story icon for AI slop?

No original research, but summarising the research of others has been a business model long before Reader's Digest and Slashdot. At least Slashdot links.

"a place where AI is a default way that content is made" One thing is sure! Using AI will not enhance the quality, just the quantity.

just means they know this thing is generating slop, saying things that are incorrect, probably biased (as many LLMs have bias in them), and likely spreading misinformation, or downright dangerous information.

And they just don't give a fuck.

Can someone stop the planet, I'd like to get off now.

If companies like this continue to generate content, then every platform they touch will end up being killed off. It may not happen this year, but it will happen. Spotify, blogs, anything.

Show of hands: How many here are old enough to remember when the CDROM first appeared?

For you young'ns out there: When the CDROM tech first made it into the hands of average folks, consumers were buying-up CDROM drives like crazy and installing them on their PCs. There were initially a few polished applications ready for people to buy and use like encyclopedias and a game called "Myst". It did not take terribly long for the vendors of good software to get on board and start making titles that took advantage of the then-considered-gigantic storage of the new media format, but in that window of time when the tech was new but there was very little GOOD content available. The scammers and fly-by-nighters popped up all over the place selling CDROM disks stuffed full of public domain stuff, text files anybody could freely get anywhere, piles of amateur computer art, MIDI music files.... ANYTHING the people making the disks could come up with to use at least a third of the space. They'd build a disk image, shoveled-up with junk, give the disk some interesting/promising title, mass produce it, and get it into stores with a moderate to low price that was just low enough that lots of people with their new CDROM drives would buy it just to have some uses for the new drives. We called these disks "Shovelware" disks.

Same thing here

YouTube is becoming a host to mountains of AI shovelware. They need to get a grip on this stuff and find a way to squash it before it convinces people that the platform is nothing but AI slop.

There's also another thing happening here which is of far greater concern:

With soul-less grifters using AI to pump out piles of videos in order to make money from click and views, much of the actual content is completely bogus...but it LOOKS shiny and "true" to many people. This is probably useful to the hyper-political and evil among us who do not care who they lie to as they try to build political narratives, BUT it's fundamentally dangerous to civilization to make a scheme in which a significant portion of the population cannot tell what is true and what is false. We were already getting a taste of this with the toxic political activists who have many people CONVINCED that Michele Obama is a man, or that Trump colluded with Russia, or Ted Cruise's dad helped kill JFK, or Chelsea Clinton is Web Hubble's kid, etc. Most of THAT stuff could be more easily debunked up to this point, but now people are pumping out AI videos that look (to average people) like valid news casts telling them garbage like [1] several Canadian provinces have become US states, [2] Clint Eastwood has had a religious conversion, [3] Elon Musk has developed a warp drive, etc. Put another way: It has escaped the political realm, and is no longer concentrated into the political cycle. Anyone who wanted to could go read the government docs on the whole collusion scam and see the reality, but there ARE no documents in government archives, with under-oath sworn testimony that apply to the stuff outside the political/governmental realm.

This is VERY bad, and it'll get worse. There's probably no geeky TECHNICAL fix for this (I know, this will not go over well on Slashdot...) As a society we're gonna have to find our way back to a place where most of us can agree on the reality that is, in fact, REAL, and can trust each others' WORD and hand shake. My grandparents' generation could do business with each other on a handshake. Everybody kept their word and worked hard to make sure they kept-up their end of any bargain. Even I can remember a time when our home had no locks on the doors, people could leave their keys in their cars, etc and nobody expected anything bad to happen. We've come a long way, and it isn't all good.

AI Slop / spam is despised by 100% of people.

Why? AI is anti human

Internet.

Inception "proudly leading the way."

"An AI Podcasting Machine Is Shitting Out 3,000 Episodes a Week"

There, fixed it.

so I can spend my mental cycles on something more better...