Artificial Intelligence, AI, especially in its generative AI large language model form, has taken front and center lately in the discussion of contemporary culture. There are all of the awful AI-generated political memes out there, deepfake nude images, faulty legal briefs with “hallucinated” citations, student essays and online discussion board posts created by ChatGPT and its various relations, and endless social media posts with dubious connections with reality created by bots.
There’s even a name for all this stuff – AI Slop. And it’s showing up everywhere in online culture and in our classrooms.
This is an AI-generated image of President Trump as a Jesus-like figure healing a man. After the president was criticized for sharing the image, he told CBS News, ““I viewed that as a picture of me being a doctor in fixing — you had the Red Cross right there, you had, you know, medical people surrounding me,” he said. “And I was like the doctor, you know, as a little fun playing the doctor and making people better. So that’s what it was viewed as. That’s what most people thought.”
President Donald Trump is fond of sharing AI images of himself looking incredibly buff in rather extreme situations, but he did generate some rare criticism from his supporters when he posted an image depicting him as Jesus healing a sick man. The president’s social media team soon took the image down, and Mr. Trump said he thought the image was just depicting him as a doctor helping people get healthy.
I saw a discussion on one of the microblogging services (X, Threads, Bluesky, etc.) earlier this week asking whether teachers still thought there was any point in having online discussion boards when a goodly percentage of students just feed the prompt into ChatGPT and get something that looks like academic writing. (The discussion actually led to some really good ideas being shared to help steer students away from the world of AI.)
I found it discouraging over the last year to see how many of my students tried to use generative AI to complete their homework. If a student does nothing more than feed the assignment prompt into the AI model and use directly what is generated, it’s pretty easy to recognize that it is not authentic student work. And while I recognize that being able to use AI in a work environment may be an important skill going forward, that was not among the skills I was teaching in my communication law, comm and society, and media literacy classes.
There’s been a huge amount of AI in the news as of late – here’s a sampling of recent stories worth paying attention to:
- AI Slop is starting to overwhelm everything, making it harder and harder to find things actually worth paying attention to (WaPo gift link)
WaPo shows how AI generated content (not writing, not art) is growing rapidly in the world of e-books, non-prisoner self-represented lawsuits, online music tracks, scientific (and other) scholarly papers, and online content.- As an example… Was a prize-winning literary story AI generated? (NYT gift link)
And if so, what does that say about the quality of the contest judging? One key part of authentication, beyond analyzing the text by both humans and AI detectors, would be actually talking with the author of the story – something that in this case seems to have been problematic (or not…) - And another… “Book on truth in the Age of A.I. Contains Quotes Made Up by AI” (NYT gift article)
To me, this is at the core of what is wrong with the use of AI in creative activity. The question of “who” and “how” is being answered by “nothing matters, nothing is real.”
- As an example… Was a prize-winning literary story AI generated? (NYT gift link)
- Bipartisan congressional “NO FAKES’ legislation advancing that would ban unauthorized replicas of a person’s voice or likeness (Deadline)
The NO FAKES Bill would control the unauthorized use of AI duplicates of a person’s voice or likeness. The control would last 70 years following the person’s death. The bill provides exceptions for news, scholarly work, and traditional fair use. The bill is supported by the SAG-AFTRA union, representing people in the entertainment and news industries. - Students boo tech bro commencement speaker extolling AI (WSJ gift link)
Students attending commencement at University of Arizona last week booed former Google CEO Eric Schmidt when he “told students the ‘technological transformation’ wrought by artificial intelligence will be ‘larger, faster and more consequential than what came before.'” And Schmidt is reportedly not the only graduation speaker to be heckled for praising AI. The article also discusses communities fighting back against the construction of loud power- and water-consuming data centers that companies are trying to bring to a range of rural communities.
And finally…
Do any of you remember watching James Cameron’s 1984 film The Terminator about a relentless killer robot (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) powered by a self-aware AI network called Skynet? No particular reason for asking…