I really can’t hold it in anymore. Some of the garbage generated by AI has caused great trouble to some small things in my daily life.

Yesterday was the New Year. During the day, I wanted to find an anime-style reference picture of a snake to make a New Year's card.

However, just such a simple search made me really feel that something is getting more and more wrong with the current Internet.

I searched the keyword "snake anime" in the search engine.

The results on the first page were like this. At that moment, I just felt a chill creeping up my spine from the computer screen.

For the convenience of reading the article, I directly marked it for everyone: everything crossed out with a slash is generated by AI.

Well...the third picture in the third row is from a real artist...the rest are all AI. . .

These greasy painting styles, rubbish aesthetics, and really inferior AI made me afraid that I might be blind and admit my mistake, so I clicked on them one by one to confirm, and finally confirmed, It's all AI.

None of them are useful references. . .

This is still the first page of search results.

I turned 3 or 4 more pages before some pictures of real people began to appear.

What’s even more terrifying is that I discovered that not only this keyword, low-quality AI content has quietly spread to every corner of the Internet.

For example, for the keyword "peony", I didn't add any painting style requirements.

I don’t need to mark the results found, they are all.

There is also the area hardest hit by AI, "Dragon".

Except for the Q version, all of them are AI, every point is accurate.

The more I searched, the weirder it became. . .

I was smart enough to think that this was probably a search engine problem, so I could avoid it by going to some photography and design material websites for inspiration.

I didn’t expect it to be so hard to guard against.

Originally, I saw that the material website had an option to “block images created by AI” and thought I could finally find a normal reference.

Among the first 10 pictures found, 6 that I crossed out were AI.

Seriously, these AI pictures don’t even bother to pretend.

As long as you have high-quality AI pictures, forget it.

A large part of the result is that the structure is broken, the light and shadow are chaotic, and the texture is greasy. They are all micro-do things carved from the same mold. Ordinary people will know that they are garbage at a casual glance, let alone Say that I deal with AI every day.

Seeing these garbage pictures flooding the gallery and starting to have some impact on my daily life, I suddenly wanted to ask a question:

What exactly are these AI garbage? Where did it come from?

Tracing the sources of the pictures one by one, I finally solved the case, and the answer is very consistent with what I expected:

Basically all of these AI pictures come fromContent platforms and social media.

The most common source is short video platforms.

Just the keyword "peony" allowed me to follow the clues and find several "replica" accounts.

There are hundreds of almost identical pieces of content on these account homepages, and the images and copy used are all generated using the same prompt.

Hundreds of repetitive content, all of which are AI-generated pictures of dragons and peonies, accompanied by various Internet chicken soups and inspirational messages Quotations and popular BGM, the traffic is not bad, and there are 10,000 likes.

There are also content platforms that have been crazily invaded by replicant wallpaper accounts.

This kind of wallpaper accounts are all clones. I have opened N accounts. Each account is the same. AI generates pictures and AI copywriting, and then each account posts a nine-square grid every day. AI garbage.

It’s very annoying, it completely turned my search engine into a cyber cesspool.

The same goes for the AI ​​images in material websites, most of which come from image and text content platforms.

These accounts and content inexplicably remind me of a short video that was very popular before: "The Huanglongjiang faction all have Bluetooth, remember the principles I gave..."

That's it That kind of strong human-machine feeling.

They tirelessly publish hundreds of identical pieces of content. Over time, with the blessing of algorithms, these garbage are like cancer cells, eroding every corner of the Internet.

Think about it before, we were used to trolls making their presence felt in comment areas, but now a large number of AI clones have appeared on content platforms.

The logic behind it is still “traffic for profit”.

Creators want to monetize traffic, and AI technology just gives them the most efficient means of bombing. So, piece by piece, piece by piece, "AI junk content" with a production cost of close to zero is spread like this. To the world.

The Internet, especially content platforms, need content to create consumption.

In order to motivate creators, basically all platforms have so-called "traffic incentives". The most intuitive one is the direct realization of traffic.

Although traffic rewards have been reduced a lot in the past two years, they are still there, and major platforms still use various "advertising", "cooperation" and "rewards" to provide creators with a variety of opportunities. profit, in the hope that more creators will continue to output content for the platform.

Assume that for every 1,000 views of a video, you can earn 10 cents in cash. If you create a video for a week, you may only earn a few dozen yuan.

But using AI to open N clone accounts and bombard them wildly, posting 1,000 pictures a day is as easy as drinking water. If a little adds up to a lot, these people might earn more than those who are serious about creating content.

Now when I search on short video platforms and second-hand trading websites, the screen is full of AI masters who want to teach me how to make a fortune.

Every title is a gimmickIt was enough, I didn’t suffer any loss anyway, so I placed an order to see what these people were up to.

As soon as I paid, the other party automatically replied with a network disk link.

Don’t say it, I really added it. . .

In the end, these people go around and around, and finally want you to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to join the "high-quality AI group" and "customized private domain."

People are waving the banner of AI under the guise of efficiency, but they are still doing the most primitive business of cutting leeks.

But that’s not all that really makes me uneasy.

I often think: What should we do when one day we can no longer find a clean river in the ocean of information?

What is drowned in the massive AI images and copywriting in search engines is not only my creative inspiration, but also my basic trust in the world.

What’s even more disgusting is that these mass-produced garbage will be captured and learned by AI again, and the garbage will iterate into fresher garbage, completing the Dzogchen realm of cyber-feeding shit to users.

In the field of SEO, this cyber-feeding content farm model is of course nothing new, but in those days there was only text, but now, all modes have been fully invaded.

I don’t know how many similar turbulences I will experience in the future, but I always firmly believe that good content is like pearls deep in the river bed and will eventually be discovered.

Faced with the overwhelming AI garbage nowadays, someone will eventually stand up to defend that precious and irreplaceable human expression.

We are not desperate now, we just need to spend more effort to pick up the things that truly belong to us.

See, listen, speak, and stick to the source of the content.

Otherwise, in this era of information explosion, we will lose not only the so-called inspiration, but also the sincerity and trust that go with inspiration.

So, please remember.

When the sky full of AI garbage falls in the night sky, and when the torrent of data sweeps in, you can still calmly push it aside and continue to look for that weak but unextinguished light.

It's there.

Always there.