President Joe Biden demanding boba. A children’s book for sale on Amazon. A trailer for «The Simpsons» if it were an 80’s sitcom.
AI-generated content is quickly becoming a mainstay on major internet platforms, wreaking havoc on some that aren’t ready to take on what is sometimes called “synthetic media.”
While some creators are enjoying the comedic potential of generative AI tools and racking up millions of views on social media platforms, others, like magazine publishers, are struggling to deal with the onslaught of unusable AI-generated content.
Clarkesworld, a sci-fi magazine powered entirely by stories submitted by outside writers, was forced to shut down its online submission portal after AI-generated submissions skyrocketed last month.
“It has buried our workload and buried the presentations we were interested in reading,” said Neil Clarke, editor-in-chief of Clarkesworld.
«It’s like trying to have a conversation with someone in a room and a small horde of little kids come screaming in,» Clarke added.
AI-generated content has also been banned in some cases. Getty Images and Shutterstock said in october that they were banning visual art created by AI. In January, a major AI conference said AI-generated documents were banned.
Some platforms have rules around AI content, but not many. Google welcomes AI generated content as long as manipulating rankings in search results is not its primary purpose.
The question some AI researchers say they are grappling with is whether AI-generated content is enhancing creativity on the internet or wasting it.
“We have very little control over how AI is implemented on the web and how people create products,” said Maggie Appleton, a product designer at the AI Research Lab, who has written about what AI content could mean for the internet.
“The challenge is how do we decide to have agency over all of this as it unfolds and the way AI is used in society,” Appleton said.
For now, there are few to no rules on major internet platforms about AI-generated media.
On YouTube, some users have uploaded dozens of videos mixing entertainment genres like “Star Wars as a 70’s spaghetti western» either «arab psycho” created by AI platforms like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.
Brett Schickler, a seller from Rochester, New York, said he recently published a 30-page children’s book using ChatGPT3, an artificial intelligence chatbot that has proven adept at producing written works that mimic a variety of genres in response to simple prompts.
Amazon’s Kindle store had more than 200 eBooks listing ChatGPT as authors or co-authors as of mid-February. according to Reuters.
“I probably created the entire book in less than an hour,” Schickler said.
And while his first book sold no more than a few digital copies, Schickler’s TikTok account racked up hundreds of thousands of views with videos detailing how to take advantage of ChatGPT3 and Kindle Direct Publishing to become a less creatively challenged author.
Also on TikTok, videos created using AI-powered voice tools have taken off in recent months, with people generating videos of celebrities and politicians having all kinds of conversations.
Comedian and social media creator Elyza Halpern started a social media series called «Joe & Barry,» in which she impersonates wacky comedic conversations between Biden and former President Barack Obama. Recent videos have included a disgruntled Biden wanting a boba drink and complaining that Beyoncé was snubbed for album of the year at the Grammys.
Though the dialogue between the two presidents is silly and implausible, the duo’s voice tones are eerily spot on. Halpern said he pays $5 a month for an app called Celebrity Voice Changer to create videos of him.
While Halpern said artificial intelligence tools in the comedy community create unique and expansive opportunities, he also fears for his friends who make their living impersonating characters.
“It’s scary for a lot of creators when companies used to hire real humans to create things. Now they will think they can get away with using AI,” he said. «It’s really like a double-edged sword.»
AI programs work differently depending on the type of content they generate, but they do share some similarities, particularly in how consumers use them. Users come up with prompts or ideas that they then send to AIs, which produce pieces of media based on large data sets that they have been trained on.
Schickler said it’s like having a conversation with someone: going back and forth with the machine discussing the book’s plot and characters, and eventually the story comes together. The same goading technique was needed with MidJourney, the artificial intelligence program Schickler used to generate illustrations for the book. The process was simple, but still required a certain level of creativity, he said.
Although detection tools exist to help filter out AI-generated content, their effectiveness is mixed. Clarke said such tools are less than 50% accurate in his experience, leaving his team to examine the submissions for themselves.
Looking to the future of AI-powered technology, Appleton said he expects an internet world that is expansive but difficult to navigate.
“There are a lot of scary things about the human condition,” he said. «I think we will have access to more information, but it will be more difficult to know what was really human.»