Meet Sophie Cress, a licensed marriage and family therapist with over 8 years of experience, with a master’s degree and additional certifications. Except, there is a very good chance that she, and some of her colleagues like Aliyah Moore and Dainis Graveris, don’t exist at all, except for online marketing purposes. This sends the journalist Ashley Abramson exploring the slop created to gamify search engine algorithms for more traffic.
For journalists, already professionally obligated to be skeptical, that mistrust has to extend to potential sources. Of course, anyone could always claim to be anyone … But AI programs make it so incredibly, terrifyingly easy to generate a chunk of text that seems, at least at first skim, like it was written by an expert in any field you can think of.
AI doesn’t have to be involved for slop to be created. Humans are perfectly capable of producing low-quality content and spreading misinformation.