AI: Guardrails, Hallucinations and AI Slop
 | Author:
Vic Sample
Vic Sample: MT43 News Treasurer |
AI: Guardrails, Hallucinations and AI Slop
Vic Sample
AI (Artificial Intelligence) has been a big topic for over 3 years. I see 30-40 different AI-based articles every single day. If you do any research or read any articles you will see reference to the terms Guardrails, Hallucinations and AI Slop. Strange terms for something that is supposed to be so transformative!
Next Up: AI SLOP
AI SLOP:
From Microsoft Copilot: “AI slop refers to the flood of low-effort, low-quality content generated by artificial intelligence—often created for clicks, SEO, or monetization with little regard for accuracy, originality, or human value. It’s become a major concern across social media, publishing, and search engines, especially since 2024.”
Neal Mohan (CEO of YouTube) has been very vocal about AI Slop: “It’s becoming harder to detect what’s real and what’s AI-generated.” “To reduce the spread of low-quality AI content, we’re actively building on our established systems that have been very successful in combating spam and clickbait.”
If you use Facebook at all, you have been subjected to a flood of AI Slop. Outrageous “headlines”, totally fictitious pictures claiming all sorts of attention-getting titles. Lots of incredibly cute and adorable videos that are all fantasy, created by AI.
After the FBS College Football Championship game (Indiana vs. Miami), I saw a number of AI-generated posts that were outrageously provocative. Claiming the Miami coach or the Miami quarterback was stating the game was rigged; that the refs were told to make sure Indiana won; that the Miami quarterback had seen high school teams better than Indiana.
Of course, none of that was true. The Facebook posts were apparently inspired by the fact that a few Miami players left the game without congratulating the Indiana players. That is a long, long way from making the claims in the Facebook posts. Somebody is just trying to garner clicks from outrageous claims – all generated by AI.
I have seen images of terrible tragedies claiming death or serious injury to a great number of politicians, sports stars, and movie/television celebrities. Rarely is there any grain of truth in the headlines on these images.
As Neal Mohan noted, it is harder and harder to detect what is real and what is AI-generated fiction. I read an article detailing how to detect a real image from a deep fake AI image; it was filled with arcane details and would take hours to examine an image to MAYBE determine it was a fake.
In this very divided time, many people are making claims about all sorts of things – especially politics. It is almost impossible to tell from just reading or seeing AI-generated material (of course, if the AI-generated text, images, or videos agree with our views, it is pretty easy to judge them true).
If there is something that catches your attention, you need to verify it by doing research from valid sources that can PROBABLY be trusted. AI is being used for everything, and we all have to be vigilant.
