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I got fooled by AI.
I was browsing my social media (self-hosted) and I saw a funny comic. It was a variation of the “We have X at home” meme, where the version at home is worse. It was one of those broad comics that is designed to be both widely applicable, but feel very personally directed. the sort of thing that always gets boosted around because it lets people say “that’s me!” and we like seeing ourself reflected back to us. It’s a very human feeling.
I saw the thing, had the “it’s me!” response and did the thing it was designed for, I shared it with friends. And not long after one of y friends said it looked AI generated. I was initially a little doubtful, because disliking AI has become something I care a lot about. I wouldn’t say it’s a core part of my identity, but I take a lot of pride in not using the plagiarism machine or spreading it around. But the plagiarism machine is designed to make things that are plausible. it could be blocks of human-sounding text or images that seem like they make sense, but they’re built on the back of stolen work made by actual people. Annd that’s before you get to the environmental impact, or the abuse of Kenya workers to create the training for the paganism machines.
I know those things and those are the reasons I don’t use or share AI generated anything. So I was skeptical when someone said I did. this is an example of the sort of backwards facing justification that us humans are really good at. I’m tell myself that I’m not the sort of person who shares AI generated slop, so if I shared something it must not be AI generated. But I took a harder look at it. I asked for why the person who called it out thought it was AI generated. And they made some compelling arguments, pointing to some of the weird inconsistencies that my brain had skipped over. I also did some research trying to find the original creator of the comic. And when I was doing that I found other people pointing out mistakes that I wouldn’t have even noticed; but I did notice that nobody was taking credit for it.
Maybe 15 years ago. In the earliest days of social media as we know it now, there was a big push from artists for attribution and credit. It was not uncommon for someone to take a comic or funny image that somebody made and repost it. there were whole accounts that made a business out of reposting the creations of other people, almost always removed from the original context of how it was created. They acted as if funny images and memes were just fossils being dug out of the earth rather than something that a person took time and thought and effort to make. I know multiple artists who called out this behavior at the time, and who put work into fighting the attribution problem, as it was often called. They lost, I’m afraid to say. There are still plenty of content farm accounts on every social media platform. they never really went away. At best you might see “Credit to the original artist” as if that was any sort of actual attribution.
Now in the plagiarism and stealing of unattributed content has been scaled up through the use of AI generation. That’s what the AI is for. It’s actual purpose is fraud at scale. It used to take work and effort to make things, but now the sheer volume of slop that can be generated can overwhelm anyone’s feed.
It got me. I got fooled by something I should have caught, and it was a combination of failures on my part. I should have sought out the actual source, I should have put some critical thinking into looking at the picture itself and look for any tale-tale signs.
I say this not as a mea culpa but as a warning and an extension of grace. The internet is full of slop. It’s gunna get us all eventually. But I’m also just tired of talking about it.
I was browsing my social media (self-hosted) and I saw a funny comic. It was a variation of the “We have X at home” meme, where the version at home is worse. It was one of those broad comics that is designed to be both widely applicable, but feel very personally directed. the sort of thing that always gets boosted around because it lets people say “that’s me!” and we like seeing ourself reflected back to us. It’s a very human feeling.
I saw the thing, had the “it’s me!” response and did the thing it was designed for, I shared it with friends. And not long after one of y friends said it looked AI generated. I was initially a little doubtful, because disliking AI has become something I care a lot about. I wouldn’t say it’s a core part of my identity, but I take a lot of pride in not using the plagiarism machine or spreading it around. But the plagiarism machine is designed to make things that are plausible. it could be blocks of human-sounding text or images that seem like they make sense, but they’re built on the back of stolen work made by actual people. Annd that’s before you get to the environmental impact, or the abuse of Kenya workers to create the training for the paganism machines.
I know those things and those are the reasons I don’t use or share AI generated anything. So I was skeptical when someone said I did. this is an example of the sort of backwards facing justification that us humans are really good at. I’m tell myself that I’m not the sort of person who shares AI generated slop, so if I shared something it must not be AI generated. But I took a harder look at it. I asked for why the person who called it out thought it was AI generated. And they made some compelling arguments, pointing to some of the weird inconsistencies that my brain had skipped over. I also did some research trying to find the original creator of the comic. And when I was doing that I found other people pointing out mistakes that I wouldn’t have even noticed; but I did notice that nobody was taking credit for it.
Maybe 15 years ago. In the earliest days of social media as we know it now, there was a big push from artists for attribution and credit. It was not uncommon for someone to take a comic or funny image that somebody made and repost it. there were whole accounts that made a business out of reposting the creations of other people, almost always removed from the original context of how it was created. They acted as if funny images and memes were just fossils being dug out of the earth rather than something that a person took time and thought and effort to make. I know multiple artists who called out this behavior at the time, and who put work into fighting the attribution problem, as it was often called. They lost, I’m afraid to say. There are still plenty of content farm accounts on every social media platform. they never really went away. At best you might see “Credit to the original artist” as if that was any sort of actual attribution.
Now in the plagiarism and stealing of unattributed content has been scaled up through the use of AI generation. That’s what the AI is for. It’s actual purpose is fraud at scale. It used to take work and effort to make things, but now the sheer volume of slop that can be generated can overwhelm anyone’s feed.
It got me. I got fooled by something I should have caught, and it was a combination of failures on my part. I should have sought out the actual source, I should have put some critical thinking into looking at the picture itself and look for any tale-tale signs.
I say this not as a mea culpa but as a warning and an extension of grace. The internet is full of slop. It’s gunna get us all eventually. But I’m also just tired of talking about it.