“Artificial Intelligence garbage” invades platforms and competes with news content | Miscellaneous

In the world of digital platforms, major battles are no longer fought only between countries and politics, but also between an angry potato and a tomato exchanging blows in front of millions of viewers. Short clips, absurd, and sometimes without any logical meaning, but they succeed amazingly in grabbing attention and keeping users glued to the screen until the end.

This type of content, which is created by artificial intelligence tools at tremendous speed, raises questions that go beyond entertainment:

• Why can’t we stop watching?
• Are algorithms able to manipulate our brains in a way similar to “digital hypnosis”?

The Al Jazeera report, prepared by Nisreen Baddour, indicates that the secret does not lie in the potatoes or tomatoes themselves, but in the way the brain reacts to unexpected things. When a person sees something familiar that behaves in an illogical way, such as a potato crying or screaming, the mind enters a state of “breaking the pattern,” which is a psychological response that prompts the brain to stop and pay attention to try to explain the surprise.

The platform’s algorithms take advantage of these precious seconds of concentration, flooding the user with an endless stream of strange and random clips that keep him in a constant state of suspense. Some former technology company employees liken this mechanism to “slot machines,” which give the brain repeated bursts of excitement and dopamine to prolong viewing time.

This content has become known within technology circles as “artificial intelligence garbage,” referring to the huge amount of bad or absurd clips that are produced solely to attract attention and generate advertising profits, within a digital industry worth billions of dollars.

Research estimates indicate that a large percentage of the content circulating on social platforms has been generated by artificial intelligence, while TikTok previously announced that more than 1.3 billion posts on its platform were produced by artificial intelligence during just one period, a number that reflects the size of the accelerating digital deluge.

But the concern does not stop at the borders of entertainment or wasting time, as the report warns that this flood of absurd content may turn into a means of flooding the digital space with noise, such that humanitarian issues and important news disappear. Instead of directly blocking serious content, it may be sufficient to simply flood it with a huge amount of superficial clips that absorb the audience’s attention.

In a world where the real is mixed with the artificial, the battle of potatoes and tomatoes seems to be more than just a passing digital joke, but rather a model for a new era in which algorithms compete for human attention, while his ability to distinguish between what is worth watching and what is created only to keep him captive to the screen is gradually declining.