At an accelerating pace, AI-generated “content” is winning out over things written and created by humans. It accounts for a large amount of the content on many social media platforms, and a very large majority in places like the Reels section of the Facebook surveillance and manipulation platform. This even extends to LinkedIn, a platform that its owner, Microsoft, continues to purport is a business networking platform.
More troubling is the increasingly common sight of users engaging with AI slop as if it were real. I’m not referring to those sock puppet bots that make short comments or post reactions to such AI slop to fake up engagement, but rather accounts that look like actual human users.
Well, it doesn’t take much intelligence to purchase a smartphone, make a Facebook account, and retreat into a pseudo-life that avoids the real world.
People who prefer real life might consider escaping from the AI-centric confines of social media and venturing into—returning to, for many people—real life.
Some people might posit that a real life can coexist with an online life on social media. I would counter that people who spend hours making countless posts on social media and who go places and do things so that they can post those places and things on social media are missing out on a lot of what might be going on beyond the computer or smart phone screen.