Have We Already Crossed the Uncanny Valley of AI-Generated Content? (2/3)

This is a three-part series discussing how AI-generated content is plunging us into a psychological “uncanny valley.” We trace the phenomenon from its robotics roots to viral AI media and examine the future prospects of increased regulation, improving digital literacy, and developing conscious AI-human collaboration.

Part 2: The Mutation of Truth

Have you ever imagined AI as a new breed of mutant, straight out of the 90s X-Men animated series?

 

In that world, some mutants (like Professor Charles Xavier's X-Men) choose to live in harmony with humans, using their powers to help society while others (like Magneto’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants) see human authority as oppressive and seek domination.

 

Today, we see a similar drama with AI. There are scenarios where AI tools were created to assist creative people and there are some scenarios where AI runs wild by rewriting news and images with no human oversight. And just as the animated series had different factions, our AI landscape features various “camps” of super-powered algorithms. Some are aligned with giant tech firms working on safety and ethics, others are open-source projects unleashed without filters, and yet more are wild hacks on social platforms.

The Rise of AI Slop and Brain Rot Content

That’s the slang people have coined for the tidal wave of low-quality AI media flooding the internet. Think of it like cheap leftovers of creativity: a deluge of articles, images, and videos cranked out by bots that often feel stale, jumbled, or just plain wrong.

 

 

Industry insiders at AI-and-film festivals joke about many generative shorts being “AI slop” as unpolished freebies that exhaust the audience’s goodwill. Indeed, some of these generative creations are weird, bizarre, and even absurd. There are some unscrupulous content creators who used generative AI to create low-effort, low-value content online from faceless YouTube channels for quick money grab to malicious AI bots to misinform and harass people online.

Distorting Truth and Perception of Reality

The flood of AI slop brings a darker underbelly: fake news and trust erosion. AI makes it crazy easy and cheap to churn out convincing lies. As experts warn, tools like GPT or image generators can fabricate entire scandals or reinforce biased narratives at scale. For instance, Penn State researchers note that today’s “pink slime” news sites (partisan outlets often filled with AI-written articles) are proliferating by the dozen. These sites frequently lack bylines, contain telltale GPT prompts, and are designed to sow division.

 

Social media amplifies them like whack-a-mole game so that every time one gets debunked, another pops up. In this election year, that means an onslaught of voice clones of candidates, deepfaked protest footage, and articles that sound plausible but are pure fiction. As Wired puts it, a “boundless corpus of new content” may emerge where machines write the news and other machines “read and respond to it,” warping our entire information ecosystem.

 

Meanwhile, AI bias is another mutation. Model collapse is imminent when generative models learn from existing data and old human prejudices. Studies show AI-generated images can reflect and amplify stereotypes. In one analysis of Midjourney outputs for journalistic roles, every image of a “reporter” or “journalist” was a light-skinned person. The AI seemed to default to whiteness for news staff, echoing the industry’s own diversity gaps. It also split age and gender sharply: younger people appeared for general job titles, whereas “specialist” roles showed older men but no older women.

 

In short, the AI reinforced the outdated idea that news reporters are white and that veteran experts are male. This kind of slanted output subtly warps our perception: if we mostly see white faces in AI art for CEOs or tech founders, a casual viewer may internalize that bias.

Creative Industry Under Siege

The AI mutation is hitting artists and writers hard too. In creative fields, fear and uncertainty run high. A recent UNCTAD report notes that since 2022 generative AI has “made significant inroads” into industries long thought safe for humans from graphic design to game art to songwriting.

 

Those predictions of massive job losses are proving true: just in 2023 and 2024 we’ve seen wave after wave of layoffs in Hollywood, publishing, and advertising, many explicitly blamed on AI tools automating parts of the creative process. A famous example is the publishing industry’s adjustments after an AI-generated novel made headlines with editors now scrutinizing AI use as some book jobs are cut. The message is clear: if an AI can illustrate a book cover in minutes, that’s one fewer gig for the artist.

All these changes take a psychological toll. People are anxious and often exhausted by the onslaught of synthetic content.

 

There’s a constant nagging question: Can I trust anything I see online?

 

Every celebrity voice clip or deepfake meme breeds a little more skepticism. Social media users report “trust fatigue” when they begin to doubt even genuine posts, unsure if they’re real or AI-generated. News consumers are wary too: why click a shared video if a friend might have used AI to create it?

 

Some people withdraw, oversensitive to finding anomalies (“Are those earlobes right?”); others tune out (“It’s all fake, who cares?”). The overall effect is a creeping paranoia reminiscent of the X-Men mutants, we find ourselves divided between viewing AI as helpful partners and as untrusted impostors that might replace us.

Taken together, it is a reality check as the battle for acceptance of generative AI has come to our feeds. Generated content isn’t all hero or villain, it’s a messy mix of integration and chaos. We face a landscape where “AI slop” and brain rot content floods platforms, misinformation morphs facts, bias skews images, and jobs vanish. It’s a wild, weird ride and it’s just begun.

 

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