I have truly noticed a change in how I am engaging with content nowadays, I have become more reluctant on clicking on links to articles or videos that have been made in these last few years, and when I do I started by looking for clues if it has been generated by ai. if the voice is human or generated, if the pictures are of real events or slop. I mistrust everything. and it’s exhausting. earlier slop was easier to detect nowadays it’s becoming impossible.
I get this. The weird part is that AI was supposed to make information easier to access, but it has also massively increased the cost of deciding whether information is worth trusting.
Before, I mostly asked: “Is this outdated?” Now I often ask: “Did anyone actually research or experience this, or is it just a plausible-looking summary generated from other summaries?”
What bothers me most isn’t even that AI-generated content can be wrong. Humans have always written garbage. It’s that producing convincing garbage has become essentially free, so the ratio of signal to noise is getting worse.
I don’t think “before 2022 = trustworthy” is a reliable rule either, but I understand why older content can feel more valuable now: at least you know it wasn’t produced by the current wave of generative-AI content farms.
You used to be able to identify morons just by grammar and spelling errors. Now you have to judge it by the content, which is more time consuming and difficult. It’s to the point where I have to use AI to sift through a web search because of the AI generated trash everywhere. At some point the AI generated trash will become the dominant form of content and not even an AI will be able to sift through it.