AI Slop is Easy Money

More than 20% of YouTube’s feed is now “AI slop,” report finds | TechSpot

Not only are more than half the articles on the web created by AI, but over 21% of YouTube videos being shown to new users is “AI Slop.” That’s according to a new report, which also found that the US is in third place when it comes to consumption of these low-quality generated videos.

I am not surprised by this. As a long-time YouTube viewer I’m seeing a good amount of AI slop myself. But this is what worries me most about the rise of AI; people and/or companies wanting to make a quick buck with the least amount of effort possible are going to increasingly generate low-quality content with AI-based tools…

It’s estimated that the Three Minutes Wisdom channel, which accounts for almost a quarter of the country’s view count, earns around $4 million annually from ad income.

That’s easy money…

I believe this will spill over into software development. I’m confident it already has. Companies that care more about the bottom line than they do bug-free applications will hire inexperienced developers to create enterprise apps using AI tools, leading to major security flaws.

I think we’ll start seeing more reports of data breaches as novice “developers” increasingly copy and paste AI-generated code without fully understanding what it does, much less vetting it for accuracy.

Lazy is as lazy does, and some developers I’ve known over the years have been very lazy…