AI Slop Might Finally Cure Our Internet Addiction

The Atlantic

4 days ago

Finding love is hard. For a while, dating apps seemed to make it easier, putting a city's worth of single people in the palm of your hand. But AI has cast a paranoid pall over what can already be a suboptimal experience. If you get a message that feels a little off, it is hard to know whether you are flirting with a bot —or just someone insecure enough to use ChatGPT as their own Cyrano de Bergerac. In frustration, my friend Lonni has started picking up women at the nail salon like it's 1997.
Or, in the midst of an emotionally fraught conversation with a friend or family member, a text might read strangely. Is the person on the other end using AI to compose their messages about the fairness of Aunt Beryl's will or the future of your relationship? The only way to find out is to call them or, better yet, meet them for a coffee.
Or maybe you want to learn something. Many of the internet's best resources for getting everyday answers are quickly being inundated with the dubious wisdom of AI. YouTube, long a destination for real people who know how to repair toilets, make omelets, or deliver engaging cultural criticism, is getting less human by the day: The newsletter Garbage Day reports that four of May's top 10 YouTube channels were devoted to AI-generated content. Recently, the fastest-growing channel featured AI babies in dangerous situations, for some reason. Reddit is currently overrun with AI-generated posts. Even if you never use ChatGPT or other large language models directly, the rest of the internet is sodden with their output and with real people parroting their hallucinations. Remember: LLMs are still often wrong about basic facts. It is enough to make a person crack a book.
The internet's slide toward AI happened quickly and deliberately. Most major platforms have integrated the technology whether users want it or not, just at the moment that some AI photos and videos have become indistinguishable from reality, making it that much harder to trust anything online. Over time, LLMs might get more accurate, or people might simply get better at spotting their tells. In the meantime, a real possibility is that people will turn to the real world as a more trustworthy alternative. We've been telling one another to 'touch grass' for years now, all while downloading app- and website-blocking software and lockable phone safes to try to wean ourselves off constant internet use. Maybe the AI-slop era will actually help us log off.
Even before AI started taking over, the internet had been getting less and less fun for a while. Users have been complaining about Google Search degrading for years. Opening an app to get a ride, order takeout, or find a vacation house can be just as expensive and effortful as taking a taxi, calling in a delivery order, or booking a hotel once was. Social media is a grotesque, tragedy-exploiting, MechaHitler-riddled inferno. Where going online once evoked a wide-eyed sense that the world was at our fingertips, now it requires wading into the slop like weary, hardened detectives, attempting to parse the real from the fake.
Nevertheless, as AI companies build browsers and devices that keep users tidily contained in an endless conversation with their own personalized AIs, some people may spend more time online than ever. Its accuracy aside, AI is already valued by many for entertainment, practical help, and emotional support. In some extreme cases, users are falling in love with chatbots or drifting into all-consuming spiritual delusions, but many more are simply becoming thoroughly addicted. The internet's new era may push AI skeptics to spend less time online, while another group ramps up their AI-mediated screen time. That split might have implications for the internet's culture—and the culture at large.
Even for those who run from the slop, the internet is already so woven into every part of our lives that going cold turkey is pretty much impossible. But as it gets worse, the real world starts to look pretty good in comparison, with its flesh-and-blood people with whom we can establish trust, less overwhelming number of consumer options, slower pace, and occasional moments of unpredictable delight that do not create financial profit for anyone.
I have been experimenting with being less online since 2022, when I quit Twitter. As soon as I got through withdrawal, I could feel my attention span start to expand. I started reading books again. Like a lot of people who left social media, more of my socializing moved over to group chats with people I actually know and in-person get-togethers: quick coffees and camping trips and dinner parties. Remember dinner parties?
Later, I quit shopping online, and soon realized that I didn't need most of what I had been buying. The majority of the stuff I actually did need, I could get at the grocery store and my local hardware store, which, like most hardware stores, carries tons of things besides wrenches and bolts.
Online shopping might have once been more convenient than schlepping to a store, but I think that's no longer true in many cases. Last winter, when my feet were chronically cold under my desk, I could have spent hours researching space heaters online, trying to guess which reviews were real and which were fake; placed an order online; possibly received a broken or substandard unit; and then had to package it back up and take it to some random third-party store in a return process designed to be annoying. Instead, I walked to the hardware store. 'We have one that oscillates and one that doesn't,' the guy in the vest told me. I took the one that oscillates. It works fine.
I am not, I hasten to say, completely offline. Like most people, my job requires me to use the internet. But I am online less. And I am happier for it. I get outside more. I garden and read more books. I still follow the news, but less compulsively. Spending some parts of my day without my attention being monetized or my data being harvested is a nice bonus. It makes me feel kind of like a line-dried bedsheet smells.
I find myself dreaming about additional returns to offline existence. I live in Portland, Oregon, where we still have lots of movie theaters and even a video-rental place. I could—I might—cancel all my streaming services and just rent stuff and watch movies at the theater. I could even finally assuage my guilt over the lousy way music-streaming services pay musicians and avoid being fooled by AI bands by going back to CDs and records—and by seeing more artists play live. I don't think I'll be the only one reorienting toward physical media and physical presence: books and records, live theater and music, brick-and-mortar stores with knowledgeable salespeople, one long conversation with one real person instead of 300 short interactions with internet strangers who might be robots.
Tech companies may assume that the public is so habituated—or even addicted—to doing everything online that people will put up with any amount of risk or unpleasantness to continue to transact business and amuse themselves on the internet. But there is a limit to what at least some of us will take, especially when the alternative has real appeal. One recent study shows that disconnecting your phone from the internet creates a mood boost on par with pharmaceutical antidepressants. And if more people explore offline alternatives—at least until this whole generative-AI explosion works itself out—it could create a feedback loop, livening up cities and communities, which then become a more tempting alternative to screens. What the internet will become in a post-AI world is anybody's guess. Maybe it'll finally become something transcendent. Or maybe, as the conspiracy theory