Albert Burneko, Defector:

Over this past weekend, the Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Inquirer’s weekend editions included identical huge “Best of Summer” inserts; in the Inquirer’s digital edition the insert runs 54 pages, while the entire rest of the paper occupies 36. Before long, readers began noticing something strange about the “Summer reading list for 2025” section of the insert. Namely, that while the list includes some very well-known authors, most of the books listed in it do not exist.

This is the kind of fluffy insert long purchased by publishers to pad newspapers. In this case, it appears to be produced by Hearst Communications, which feels about right for something with Hearst’s name on it. I cannot imagine most publishers read these things very carefully; adding more work or responsibility is not the point of buying a guide like this.

What I found very funny today was watching the real-time reporting of this story in parallel with Google’s I/O presentation, at which it announced one artificial intelligence feature after another. On the one hand, A.I. features can help you buy event tickets or generate emails offering travel advice based on photos from trips you have taken. On the other, it is inventing books, experts, and diet advice.

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Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

The best way to think of the slop and spam that generative AI enables is as a brute force attack on the algorithms that control the internet and which govern how a large segment of the public interprets the nature of reality. It is not just that people making AI slop are spamming the internet, it’s that the intended “audience” of AI slop is social media and search algorithms, not human beings.

[…]

“Brute force” is not just what I have noticed while reporting on the spammers who flood Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Google with AI-generated spam. It is the stated strategy of the people getting rich off of AI slop.

Regardless of whether you have been following Koebler’s A.I. slop beat, you owe it to yourself to read this article at least. The goal, Koelber surmises, is for Meta to target slop and ads at users in more-or-less the same way and, because this slop is cheap and fast to produce, it is a bottomless cup of engagement metrics.

Koebler, in a follow-up article:

As I wrote last week, the strategy with these types of posts is to make a human linger on them long enough to say to themselves “what the fuck,” or to be so horrified as to comment “what the fuck,” or send it to a friend saying “what the fuck,” all of which are signals to the algorithm that it should boost this type of content but are decidedly not signals that the average person actually wants to see this type of thing. The type of content that I am seeing right now makes “Elsagate,” the YouTube scandal in which disturbing videos were targeted to kids and resulted in various YouTube reforms, look quaint.

Matt Growcoot, PetaPixel:

Meta is testing an Instagram feature that suggests AI-generated comments for users to post beneath other users’ photos and videos.

Meta is going to make so much money before it completely disintegrates on account of nobody wanting to spend this much time around a thin veneer over robots.

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