HN sends tens of thousands of views to AI-farmed articles about why AI is good or why AI is bad. These articles get upvoted to the front page literally every day. They don't say anything interesting, but many of us just like having our existing beliefs recited back to us.
So to answer your question, I think we all do, it's just that different audiences have different sets of topics for which they let their guard down.
There is a huge market for content that makes you feel smart without requiring thinking and makes you busy without requiring work. I'm not not saying it's inherently bad. I'm listening to music on my daily commute and it's the same thing: just enjoyable filler so that you can do something other than getting angry at other drivers. The internet just weaponized the formula, and now AI is the equivalent of nuclear weapons I guess.
If someone listens to a couple of minutes of a 30 minute slopfest and nopes away, is that counted as a listen?
Your example of HN sending views to shit is interesting, because I presume a lot of people sometimes click on a link expecting something insightful and is greeted by bullshit. A view is counted, but no meaningful interaction happened.
As I understand Spotify et al may do something a bit more sophisticated, but the traditional model for podcast analytics purely tracks downloads, which could very well be your client auto-downloading a subscribed episode you never play. I don't think anyone actually has visibility of "listens". And the traditional model for ad sales is a creator (or an agent on their behalf) emailing a brand "Hey, we make this podcast which gets X monthly downloads, want to buy an ad read?" I think they usually point to iTunes store rankings to somewhat support these claims but again, iTunes just tracks downloads. (Obviously, this is all rife for fraud.)
In some ways it doesn't really matter because once you've got enough data points you'll know what percentage of views result in an ad click (or whatever) and then you can figure out how many views you need to hit your revenue targets.
No, but to misinform people you have two main strategies: limiting through tailored scarcity and dilute in extra-generic overabundance. Don’t get it wrong: both can be combined and even can sometime overlap.
It doesn’t matter if no one is listening. Equally saturating all channels, metrics and indicator is enough to create hindrance so preventing relevant information to spread in meaningful time.
Attention is all you need, so distraction is all that will be given.
I listened to a podcast a while back (human authored I'm pretty sure) about low-quality gutter level streamer content and how popular it is, speaking of personalities like asmongold and a vast number of even worse imitators.
This content is made by humans but is pointless grindingly stupid filler spiced with a dash of obviously performative offensiveness. You're basically listening to a complete loser (or someone LARPing as one) telling you about their boogers and then being racist and then playing video games for 6 hours.
But it's wildly popular. Millions of people stream this kind of shit for hours every day.
There's a lot of people out there who just want to numb their brains, and there seems to be no floor. You can just keep making it dumber. The stuff people stream (and doom scroll) on the Internet makes 1980s daytime soaps look like high art from a lost golden age.
So it's not at all surprising that millions of people listen to low-quality un-curated AI slop podcasts.
I actually unsubbed from the podcast I heard. Meta discussion of crap like this isn't much better than the content itself. Keep driving. Do not look at the car accident.
I had kind of an epiphany like that in the last year. The Information Age means information is free. It costs $0 and is produced to infinity. That means you are not missing anything. Your attention is actually 100% yours, and if you choose to ignore the car wreck that's fine. There are infinity car wrecks. There are infinity everything. Keep driving.
The problem is I want to live in the "correct information age" - that qualifier is hard to find. I suspect that correct will cost money. Unfortunately I don't know how to pay for it. Many of the major publishers are also using AI with questionable fact checking. Where I most need correct information is my local small town news, and there isn't even a newspaper anymore. (there is the nearby big city newspaper, but they don't cover my local issues well)
The correct Information Age is the one you get when you let your prefrontal cortex play DJ and pick your media based on what will enrich your life or teach you something.
If you let your brain stem drive you’ll spend your life scrolling political rage bait and slop.
Whether the slop is made by humans or machines doesn’t much matter. I kind of think the AI thing is a red herring, though AI does make it possible to make a lot of slop. So maybe AI is the thing that forces the issue.
One of the real costs of the end game attention economy is that when your "car" crashes, noone is going to stop to help. When the market you engage in gets swallowed up, everyone will buy the swill that outcompetes you on perceived surface level value. Communities get fractured. Organizations that used to be community pillars (church) become self serving. All these things create a positive feedback loop of intellectual degradation.
The vast majority of people tuning into those kinds of slop streams are not really active listeners. It's more akin to turning on the radio while you work/clean/perform some other task that doesn't require strict focus or attention, with the added benefit that you can personally interact with the streamer (chat) when you have attention to spare. But I'd wager most viewers never directly interact or even pay much active attention to the stream at all.
I wouldn't be surprised if the same dynamic is playing out with these AI slop podcasts.
I occasionally put on a (human-made) podcast for the word-sounds rather than the content. I can imagine others do the same without caring whether it is human-made.
It's reminding me of twitter. I occasionally open it, half of the content I see is AI garbage (and by that I mean, poor quality AI generated stuff that is obviously AI), and 95% of the replies are bots responses, which aren't even AI based (most of the time not it's garbage, unrelated text)
There was one of those "memes" a few years ago that is just a screenshot of someone's Twitter post that was essentially:
"My wife is a teacher, she used AI to help create an assignment, all the kids used AI to complete it, and now she's using AI to grade it. Nobody learned anything, nobody really did anything. What's happening?"
Being the devil's advocate, it sounds like no one involved see any value in that exchange, therefore they don't care.
In that sense AI slop is a symptom, not a disease. But perhaps also a catalyst.
I really wonder if there is a sort of silver lining here, and in the long term low value activities will be filtered out of society. Though that borders on the AI maximalist view which I don't fully agree with.
Of course the glaring question is what value even is.
