From Business Insider
The golden age of the AI prankster
By Amanda Hoover
On TikTok last week, I watched a woman bury her dog in the snow on Mount Everest after he died during the punishing trek. Commenters berated the woman for animal cruelty, but this isn’t actually a sad story where the dog dies. The woman, the pup, and the mountain are all AI-generated, presumably by OpenAI’s video generator Sora 2 (although the watermark from the video had been removed, the account’s handle is Soralice). Likely from just a few lines prompting, the whole scene was born.
Researchers have sounded alarms about realistic generative AI images and videos bolstering bad actors to create ever-more realistic deepfakes for nefarious purposes. But as the masses have gotten ahold of the revolutionary tech, many are playing with it and arriving at what may be the dumbest use case: pranks and rage bait...
Some of this is the latest evolution of longstanding social media problems — highly partisan and shocking disinformation as well as rage-baiting, exploitive content can rise to the top. “In some ways this is not an algorithmic problem, it’s a human problem,” says Hany Farid, a professor in the University of California, Berkeley School of Information. People are making slop and watching slop, training the algorithms to feed users another helping of slop. Where the algorithm does play a role is in the rapid shuttling of slop or pranks or trends to many more people. And while TikTok dances have moved rapidly through feeds or X could quickly make news stories go viral, the lift to make AI-generated content has fallen so spectacularly that making the videos is about as quick as firing off a bad tweet. “With AI slop, you can adapt really quickly because you’re not making anything, and so the manipulation of these algorithms — and humans at the other end of those algorithms — can be much more dramatic.”
These sort of AI videos are all over social media right now, but their prominence could fade. “Right now we may be having the novelty effect,” says Farid. Generated AI videos catch the eye because they can create scenarios we’ve never before encountered...
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
