AI slop melodramas are taking over X
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■ In this week's Backchannel: I examine the click-driven world of AI-generated storytelling that is rapidly proliferating on social media. |
The posts are manipulative and dumb and anything but authentic |
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Hi, Backchannelers, Steven here, looking into an AI-generated guilty pleasure that I’d like to stop. For 6 months, my husband convinced everyone that I had stolen millions from the company I built, including our own daughter. As I sat in federal court, certain I was about to lose my freedom, the doors suddenly opened. My 9-year-old son walked in carrying an old blue backpack, looked straight at the judge, and said, “Your Honor. I know who framed my mom. They’re sitting in this room.” So begins a thread on X that appeared in my feed one day. I knew that the first-person narrator probably didn’t exist, and following this thread would draw me into a mawkish tale where good triumphs over evil. Indeed, the author is not a mother on trial for theft, but a self-described 21-year-old stock trader in Nigeria, who uses AI to generate stories—and gets paid for it by X.... |
Your trial has ended — but the story hasn't. |
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