He argues that the algorithms have grown too sophisticated at sorting viewers into their own individual silos. If a viewer seeks out automotive content, they receive more automotive content. If they like health and beauty, their feed is largely restricted to health and beauty. The days of a single creator punching through to hundreds of millions of viewers are effectively over. Donaldson's rise required a specific historical moment, one where recommendation engines still permitted the emergence of mass figures. That window has closed.
As reported by Deadline, the Google-owned video platform has terminated two massive YouTube channels that peddled fake, AI-generated movie trailers, in what is one of the most high profile actions it's taken against the AI spam polluting the platform. Combined, the channels - called Screen Culture, based in India, and KH Studio, based in the US - boasted over two million subscribers and more than one billion views.
Concord, NH - Attorney General John M. Formella and a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general are calling on Meta to better enforce its own policies about pharmaceutical and wellness ads on Instagram and Facebook and take additional measures to prevent AI-generated weight loss content in ads. These ads are likely to see an uptick during the holiday season and the new year, when conversations around weight loss and appearance tend to increase.
A few months ago, I went to a birthday party at a bar in Neepsend, an old industrial neighbourhood by the River Don in Sheffield. The bar had been a steelworks once, but now it was another example of the international style you find everywhere, from Portland, Oregon, to all the other Portlands in Canada, England, Australia, and New Zealand: exposed brick, steel beams, concrete floors, Edison bulbs. The steelworkers had been transformed into accountants and brand managers, the molten pig iron into £9 cocktails.
We've seen an absolute deluge of AI slop this year, from fake movie trailers on YouTube to AI-generated bands on Spotify. Not even food delivery like could escape the onslaught of AI-generated garbage that no one asked for. It's gotten to the point that half the videos my well-meaning parents send me on social media are AI-generated videos of dogs. This isn't all that surprising given how very intentionally the social media giants have added slop to all our feeds.
hey everyone, sooo... looks like Google actually started cracking down on AI generated stuff. my main site literally disappeared from search results overnight. it was ranking for months with ai articles (yea i know, bad idea now ). i used chatgpt and a few rewriters to make them "human", but seems like google aint buying it anymore. i got zero traffic now.
I've felt this too. There's a frustration I can't quite shake when consuming content now-a feeling of being stuck in a loop where everything sounds the same. I'll read a blog post, skim some code, review a document, and something feels off. Not necessarily wrong, but homogeneous. Like I've seen this exact structure, these exact words, a thousand times before. And maybe I have.
"Seattle's cosplay photography is a treasure trove of inspiration for fans of the genre. Check out these real-life cosplay locations and photos taken by @mrdangphotos. From costumes to locations, get the scoop on how to recreate these looks and capture your own cosplay moments in Seattle." effect, in which bots are essentially eating themselves over and over, in order to game their own systems.
Reddit is considered one of the most human spaces left on the internet, but mods and users are overwhelmed with slop posts in the most popular subreddits. A Reddit post about a bride who demands a wedding guest wear a specific, unflattering shade is sure to provoke rage, let alone one about a bridesmaid or mother of the groom who wants to wear white. A scenario where a parent asks someone on an airplane to switch seats so they can sit next to their young child is likely to invoke the same rush of anger.
SkyWalk fraudsters have embedded secret web browsers inside various iOS gaming apps. These apps are downloadable in the App Store and appear legitimate. Their games are playable. But when a user opens one, the app also secretly launches hidden websites on the user's iOS device. As the user plays "Sushi Party" or "Bicycle Race" in the app, the hidden sites run in the background, undetected, serving ads no one sees. Impressions are reported. Advertisers get billed. Not a single ad is viewed by a human.
Instead of sending home cooks to her decade-old, well-tested recipes, Google increasingly inserts AI-generated summaries stitched together from bits of her work and others' that often get the basics wrong. An AI-assembled version of Gargano's Christmas cake, for instance, would have people cooking a 6-inch cake for 3 to 4 hours at 320°F (160°C). "You'd end up with charcoal!" she said. Meanwhile, traffic to her turkey recipe is already down 40% year over year.
Nick's feature about the strange, sad case of "Victoria Goldiee"-a phantom writer whose spree of bylines, in publications ranging from the Guardian to Architectural Digest, have all the watermarks of chatbot prose-is the must-read piece of this closing year. With 2025 bringing flirty AI companions and lawsuits against AI giants and a looming AI bubble, his tale about the ease with which synthetic voices can now pass for human hits with the force of a horror story.
In September, I called for everyone to " push back against the AI internet." My prescription was that users of content websites should ask for tools to block AI, and that content companies should prioritize AI identification and offer blocking options. This approach to the coming wave of AI-made content should suit everyone. It gives complete access to AI content foranyone who wants it and helps people avoid a world where human-made content is uncommon and hard to find.
