Close Your Apps and Think of England

We won't go too much deeper on that because I wanted to talk about a report that you've been working on in the last few months, which actually really neatly coincides with your appearance on the podcast.

It's coming out tomorrow, Friday the 19th of June.

The report is called AI Slop in the Information Ecosystem.

And it's based upon a convening that you held in March this year of some experts and practitioners in the space.

You kindly shared it in advance.

It's a great read.

Tell us why you decided to kind of focus on AI Slop to begin with.

Is there more that we can say about AI Slob?

There's

a lot we can say about AI Slob.

I think back in early the beginning of this year, end of late last year, my colleague Camille and I were chatting and both of us are always, it's like emergent, undefined areas of like consequence, but like we don't really fully know it or catnip to both of us.

And so we ended up partnering with the Hewlett Foundation to come up with the Slob Salon, which was really fun.

We ended up, like I said, or like you said, convening about 20 folks across investigative journalism.

We had Jason Kobler from 404 Media, folks from Frontier Model Companies, academia, research, people who like think about AI generated content, particularly low quality, mass produced, algorithmically amplified AI generated content about what is the landscape of this topic.

of this issue, right? And how can we think about it? And also what can we learn from the past? So the goal wasn't to like come up with a one size fits all definition and solution.

The goal was to get a bunch of people who think about this all the time to share their perspectives and then start to kind of map it out.

And I think, you know, we can get into the definitions in a second, but for me also in designing the workshop, being both in academia, as well as coming from platform, I was very mindful that often when you get platform folks in a room, They seek to kind of bound the problem and think of it for like, how is this going to be operationalized at scale? How do we kind of frame it? Because that is a natural instinct, right? That is literally how you have to manage these things.

And yet the concerns of jumping to conclusions or...

Putting into solutions without understanding the problem fully is something I wanted to avoid.

And that tension came up.

But we ultimately kind of, even though we had a lot of disagreements on like the definitions, the scope, et cetera, we all agreed that this is not a content moderation story.

Slop isn't just, you know, it can be defined in the most common definition is really that it's the low quality kind of mass distributed content.

algorithmically amplified AI generated content, but that's kind of like where the agreement ended.

I think there was so many different perspectives on what are the harms? What are the impacts? How do we think about this? What's the scope? What are the properties of slop, et cetera.

So I encourage people to read the report.