It’s obvious to anyone with an internet connection that AI-generated content is all over the place. Still, case-by-case determinations are often difficult to make. For every piece of unapologetic copy-and-paste chatbot content, there’s a student essay with a style that’s suspicious but not quite dispositive, an avatar that’s polished but not implausible, or a LinkedIn post that’s useless and annoying in a way that seems GPT-ish but also might just be how your co-worker writes now.

A few years into the era of easy-to-generate AI images, videos, and text, the status quo is a mess, if not quite the crisis predicted by many AI firms and their critics. Generated images and videos have, as many worried, become a force in politics, but the assault on democracy has been mostly aesthetic rather than strategically deceptive, contributing to a general sense of uncertainty and unreality; likewise, across platforms where people congregate online, automated content has often behaved like rapidly advancing spam, glutting cultural spaces and marketplaces and exacerbating their worst tendencies. (When generative AI was new, the prevailing political fears were of high-stakes deepfakes and targeted disinformation. So far, what we’ve gotten is slopaganda.)

This sucks, to be frank, and people are quite vocal about hating it. Which is why some platforms are taking steps to detect and label AI-generated content. Last week, Spotify announced it would be taking steps to label AI-generated music. “Listeners have been clear in telling us that they don’t like seeing an artist profile that seems human, only to find out that the persona is AI-generated,” the company said. Last month, Substack partnered with AI-detection tool Pangram to give users the ability “to scan text to see how much of it was likely written by hand or with AI assistance.” TikTok, YouTube, and even Meta have taken steps to label some AI-generated content, while LinkedIn, where many users haven’t encountered a human word in months, introduced a “Seems Like AI Slop” button.

These steps are mostly........

© Daily Intelligencer