John Oliver takes a deep dive into AI slop on Last Week Tonight

Last Week Tonight aired its new episode on June 22, with its main story focusing on the rise of ¡°AI slop¡± in social media and content aggregation platforms. The HBO original series, going strong since its debut in 2014, entered its 12th season on February of this year and has thus far aired its 16th episode. In his segment on ¡°AI slop¡± John Oliver focused on how easy it is to mass-produce AI content and flood social media feeds with it. It doesn¡¯t help that companies such as Meta are deliberately leaning into the AI boom and tweaking their algorithms to allow more such ¡°slop¡± content. Lastly, he also discussed AI content¡¯s role in proliferating fake news and appropriating the work of real artists and craftsmen.

AI slop content is flooding social media

John Oliver showed off a viral AI-generated cat video. | Credit: YouTube

AI content is dominating social media feeds these days, with many accounts dedicated to mass-producing short, shareable posts meant to go ¡°viral¡±. John Oliver spoke of AI-generated cat stories, videos of AI-generated humans eating fruits and morphing into them, and Facebook posts of people sharing AI-generated wood carvings.

While some of these posts can be entertaining, the mass-produced nature of AI slop has only served to intensify the competition for clicks and engagement. AI slop producers are aware of this, and have monetized their own success by selling courses that can ¡°teach¡± their audience how to go viral themselves.

John Oliver explained how AI content goes viral

john oliver and his team commissioning a real artist who was harmed by a i content mills ripping off his work, in their piece ripping a i slop apart

and flying him out to appear in the ep

this feels wonderful to see from a show with that big a platform pic.twitter.com/yzfXhbji7R

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John then proceeded to provide his own insights into how AI content creators strategize for free, taking a dig at all these courses.

Step 1, as he put it, was to create a monetized page on social media, with Meta, X and YouTube all offering monetization options provided you¡¯ve crossed a certain threshold. John Oliver did note, however, that premade monetization-ready accounts can be purchased online.

Step 2 was to flood the account with as much content as possible in order to increase the chances of going viral. As John Oliver noted, content was a numbers game, and a number of AI tutorials being sold instructed users on how to maximize their rate of content generation in the shortest timeframe possible.

Finally, Step 3 was getting paid. AI content creators can get paid directly through social media platforms, or by posting affiliate links to third-party storefronts. John did note, however, that most users would make very little money from such tactics unless their posts went ¡°megaviral¡±. He then proceeded to note that the majority of AI slop channels originated from India, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Pakistan.

John ended his story by speaking of how AI slop has been leading to the proliferation of fake news, and brought on wood carver Michael Jones (who¡¯s art had been appropriated by AI) for a special appearance where he showed off a carving based on an AI video, thus reversing the trend of AI ripping off artists in a move John admitted was petty.

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