Who actually wrote this? My strange, horrifying month fighting the AI slopocalypse
The author reflects on the rapid rise of AI-generated content and the resulting societal anxiety regarding human versus machine authorship. The piece explores how various platforms are attempting to label or restrict AI content while questioning why the origin of creative work holds such deep emotional significance.
Why it matters
It highlights the growing cultural and ethical conflict over the integration of generative AI in creative industries and the search for new societal norms.
iStock; Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI Recently, I've found myself asking the same question over and over again: Did AI write this? If you spend any amount of time online, you probably have, too. Just a few short years since the advent of ChatGPT, the internet has devolved into a bot-generated wasteland. Experts warned us that the slopocalypse was coming, and it is here. The world isn't taking this lying down. Publishers are canceling book contracts. Op-eds by billionaires and professors and politicians are getting outed. The uproar has become so intense that companies are scrambling to respond. LinkedIn is encouraging users to flag suspicious posts . Substack is tagging suspected AI writing with a label. Google is building tools to help people check whether the images and videos they see were made with AI. Anthropic is now watermarking the text Claude generates.
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