When Everything's Fake, What's the Point of Social Media?

TIME

Earlier this week, a heartwarming post about a girl, a puppy, and a police officer went viral across social media platforms. The post consisted of two dashcam images of a distraught 12-year-old who, desperate to heal her sick puppy, got behind the wheel for the first time and tried to drive to the vet. She was pulled over, but commended by a police officer for being “amazing, strong, compassionate, and smart,” and the puppy was saved. Comments flooded in celebrating the bond between a girl and her furry best friend.   But when social media users took a closer look, they noticed a few strange things: the steering wheel was on the right side of the car, which also lacked a dashboard. And the image hadn’t originated on any news platform or official police page, but rather simply appeared on Facebook on its own.

Transcript

00:00I'm Andrew. I'm a human. But this person is not. And neither is this gnome.

00:06There's a good chance that your timeline has recently been filled with AI slop,

00:10low-quality content created with generative AI. That's partially because OpenAI recently released

00:16Sora 2, an advanced text-to-video model. Some videos and images are clearly fabricated,

00:22like the Pope wrestling Tupac in the ring. Others, like this homeless man in somebody's home,

00:27are harder to discern. Sora became the most downloaded free app in Apple's App Store in

00:33its first week. These videos, no matter how dumb, are part of OpenAI's plan for world domination.

00:40AI models learn about the world the more that they are used. So releases like Sora and Meta's

00:45Vibes aim to create a flywheel in which mainstream usage improves the products themselves. But before

00:51OpenAI can release artificial general intelligence, critics worry that this new flood of AI slop could

00:57be a potential death knell for social media. It's almost like we've moved from stage fright to

01:01deepfake fright. When everything looks real, nothing feels real, and we may stop engaging with online

01:07content altogether, retreating into passive consumption instead of expression because nothing

01:12we see online feels real or authentic.

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