How big of a problem is AI content spam?

Hello,

Today, I want to discuss an important thing with you. How big of a problem is AI content spam?

We’ve probably seen it all. Especially on Twitter, YouTube or TikTok. AI-generated content. It seems like the quality of the content we consume online is declining gradually. I would say about 30-40% of all the written content I consume online is written by AI. And this is just the content where it is obvious it was written by AI. It could be way more.

On one side, it’s a good thing for the people who are creating this content because it is easy and it doesn’t take that much effort. But for the consumer, this might become a problem. Here is why:

I say that quite often but I’m going to say it again. AI isn’t a reliable information source! AI can’t even understand a topic. It doesn’t know anything! An AI/LLM is just predicting the next word that would fit the best in the sentence it is writing. If you ask ChatGPT to write you an essay about cars, it can do that but it doesn’t even know what a car is.

You can probably guess now, why AI content is so problematic. The danger of misinformation. If you just let the AI write something and post it online without even researching if every piece of information is correct, this can happen very fast. Some people think: “ChatGPT has the “browsing” feature so this is not a problem”. This is only partially right. ChatGPT could accidentally pull information, that is outdated and not true anymore. That can lead to misinformation again.

The place where I notice this problem most is actually on YouTube. There are countless videos on all sorts of topics, especially science-based topics, that are created through an automated process. Some channels post a new video every two hours. It's literally impossible to create so many videos if you thoroughly research everything you put into them. This is also known as the "YouTube science crisis". Videos that fall under this category are really easy to detect. Almost all of the time, the videos are either faceless or they use an animated avatar that appears to be talking. Another thing is that a lot of these videos just show some stock footage in the background that matches the words being said. So, be aware of these videos and pay attention to potential misinformation you are receiving.

Thank you for reading this and always be aware if the information you are reading is actually correct.

See you next Friday!