Problem at scale. Doesn't matter if someone is consciously able to identify individual bot accounts or comments. There can still be a strong general feeling that something is very wrong. Leading to more and more frustration and unhappiness.

"Popular" reddit posts and subreddits are a good example of this.

It might be hard to recognize an individual user or post as AI, but it's not hard to recognize the negative effect in aggregate

It's a market for lemons [1]. The issue is that if AI slop can't be readily distinguished from real human content, the real human stuff will get less and less attention over time. With less attention, people lose interest in writing, and eventually abandon the community altogether. As genuine human writers leave the community, the concentration of AI slop increases, and readers begin to realize that there isn't anything of value left to read, so they depart as well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

Underrated take.

Yeah, the “blast radius” for social media AI slop is 80%-99% of humanity. There’s many times even I cannot make out if something is slop.

Hell, AI slop is going to be even better than reality for a portion of humanity, so it’s More likely they will stay online.