AI-generated celebrity slop is making America dumber

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Mother Jones’ Anna Merlan has an excellent look at the spread of “‘strategic memes against public participation’—images designed to confuse, sow doubt, and chill public engagement with political issues.” It’s well worth reading in full.

Merlan quotes important insights from Dmytro Iarovyi, a professor in Ukraine who studies disinformation and propaganda, about the effects of sustained exposure to disinformation: It “changes people’s capacity to participate meaningfully in democratic life… In fact, it’s one of the major tasks of modern disinformation—not to persuade people in something, yet to discourage them, turn them into passive, tired, exhausted mob.”

In the United States—and in totalitarian societies like China and Iran—it’s reasonable to expect what he calls “truth decay” tactics, Iarovyi says, “Not just individual falsehoods. The strategic product is uncertainty, polarization, and distrust—conditions that make collective action harder.”

“When disinformation is constant,” Iarovyi says, “the everyday cost of knowing what’s going on rises. People spend more time verifying the basics, or they stop trying… It reduces meaningful participation because democratic life assumes at least a minimal shared picture of reality.” [...]

“A high-volume, repetitive environment (especially when messages contradict each other) doesn’t need to persuade you of a specific lie,” he explains. “It can persuade you that truth is inaccessible, so politics becomes vibes, identity, and tribe. This is why the ‘flood the zone’ logic works: it produces exhaustion and withdrawal, not just misbelief.”

Again, the whole piece is worth reading, and I encourage you to do so.
Merlan focuses, with good reason, on political disinformation that distorts reality and makes truth seem inaccessible. That’s been top of mind for me for years, too. But lately I’ve developed a side obsession with the dumb AI slop about celebrities I encounter nearly every time I open Facebook.^[1]

Here's an example I encountered a week ago:

As AI slop goes, this is particularly sloppy: The text refers to Springsteen as a "professional golfer" (he is, as you probably do not need me to tell you, not) while the crappy AI image depicts him wearing an Iowa State University blazer, with superimposed text that purports to be (but is not) a quote from Springsteen in which the 76 year old musician identifies himself as a college basketball player. None of that is the post's most pernicious lie. That dubious honor goes to the portrayal of Springsteen, whose 1988 music video for Tougher Than The Rest "was one of the first mainstream music videos to feature a queer couple," who wrote Streets of Philadelphia for Jonathan Demme's 1993 film about a gay man living with AIDS, and whose endorsement of marriage equality made headlines, as an opponent of a (fictitious) "mandatory wearing of LGBT armbands."

The folks who wield AI slop in an effort to distort reality must really like that particular lie. Here it is again ... and again:

If those screenshots are illegible on your screen, that's "Iowa State Cyclones" Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham, supposedly making precisely the same comments in protest of the nonexistant armband mandate Bruce Springsteen didn't make. At least Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham are basketball players, though neither has ever suited up for the Iowa State Cyclones.^[2]

Here's some more stuff that didn't happen, brought to you by Facebook:

Those are two AI-generated posts spreading the same lie about Bruce Sprinsteen and Kendrick Lamar denouncing cartoons for being too gay.

All of these examples contain political content. So do many others I've encountered, like the flood of (very poorly written) AI bullshit last year about a Bruce Springsteen-Taylor Swift duet that didn't happen:

If a Springsteen-Swift duet seems like a big deal, wait until you see this star-studded concert that never happened:

Bono, Bruce, Beyoncé -- and Oprah! With "fact-checked receipts"!

But most of the slop isn't about politics. It's just bullshit designed to capture attention and clicks. Aging rock stars visiting other aging rock stars in the hospital is a popular theme. Sometimes they show up with a guitar and sing gently to their dying friend. Other times the slop is about celebrities secretly paying for a child's surgery, their selfless act going uncelebrated until the hospital speaks out:

Azzi Fudd, Kid Rock, Patti LaBelle, Babs ... there isn't a tumor in America without a celebrity patron, according to the carnival of AI slop that is Facebook.

You know who hates referees? Everyone!^[3] Maybe that's why these four college coaches all bitterly denounced them with the same overwrought speech:

Those four identical rants are attributed to UConn women's basketball coach Geno Auriemma, UNC men's basketball coach Hubert Davis, Tennessee men's basketball coach Rick Barnes, and Florida State's unnamed^[4] softball coach.

This one is a favorite of mine; I encountered it last August:^[5]

I know what you're thinking: What the heck is Steven Tyler doing there? I don't know, maybe Joan Baez is a big fan of Love in an Elevator?

These examples all come from Facebook, but they're all over Instagram, too, and various message boards and entirely-AI-bullshit-websites. And it isn't just spread by obvious bad actors: I've seen people post this stuff on message boards, believing it to be true. I've had people I know -- smart people, educated people -- recount some AI-generated celebrity nonsense they encountered to me as though it was true, or ask me about something they weren't sure of.

This might all seem harmless. Who cares if people believe Geno Auriemma made some comically overwritten comments about officiating in a college basketball game (he didn't), or if they believe the AI fiction that Elton John, "hands trembling, voice breaking," performed a tribute for Ozzy Osbourne "not as a legend, but as a grieving friend"?

Here I will return to Dmytro Iarovyi's comments in that Mother Jones peice I quoted up top: “When disinformation is constant, the everyday cost of knowing what’s going on rises. People spend more time verifying the basics, or they stop trying." And “A high-volume, repetitive environment ... can persuade you that truth is inaccessible, so politics becomes vibes, identity, and tribe. This is why the ‘flood the zone’ logic works: it produces exhaustion and withdrawal, not just misbelief.”

That AI post I mentioned earlier about a Springsteen-Taylor Swift duet that never happened got 1,600 comments on Facebook,^[6] with lots of folks falling for it unquestionably, and others more skeptical. "In this media environment, it is almost impossible to delineate fact from fiction," one person wrote. Another: "they've made their feelings and knowledge of T rump plentiful b4 this post, so there is truth in it."

The truth is inaccessible. Everything becomes vibes.

And it is getting worse, because we have created and deployed the most powerful lie machine ever imagined, with virtually no actual guardrails and precious little social stigma applied to its use. To the contrary, America's most powerful institutions and corporations are all but insisting we participate in it.

What a stupid world we are creating.^[7]

And a dangerous one: Breaking our ability to discern truth from fiction in areas we pay a lot of attention to -- and, for better or worse, sports and celebrity are two such areas -- can't help but carry over to our ability to discern truth from fiction when it comes to things most of Americans don't know as much about. Like, say, foreign policy or the tax code.

Here's Mother Jones' Merlan again:

A lack of civic participation and an inability to distinguish truth from fiction only benefits autocratic leaders. “If we don’t know what is happening in the world, if we do not have common reference points, there is no way to decide how to vote, whom to vote for, even how to have an opinion on what is going on,” warned Fred Ritchin, the dean emeritus of the International Center of Photography School, in a recent interview with the influential photobook publisher Aperture. “As many have previously warned us, including Hannah Arendt, there is now a widening path leading to autocratic governments when citizens become confused enough, essentially disarmed, so that a dictator emerges who will make the decisions for them.”