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Fil Menczer caught his first whiff of what he calls “social bots” in the early 2010s. He was mapping how information travels on Twitter when he stumbled onto a few clusters of accounts that looked a little suspicious. Some of them shared the same post thousands of times. Others reshared thousands of posts from each account. “These are not human,” he remembers thinking.
So began an extensive career in bot watching. As a distinguished professor of informatics at Indiana University at Bloomington, Menczer has studied the way bots proliferate, manipulate human beings and turn them against one another. In 2014 he was part of a team that developed the tool BotOrNot to help people spot fake accounts in the wild. He’s now regarded as one of the internet’s preeminent bot hunters.
If anyone is predisposed to notice the automatons among us, it’s Menczer. A few years ago, when a hypothesis known as the dead internet theory started kicking around, positing that nearly all conversations online had been replaced by artificial-intelligence-generated chatter, he wrote it off as bunk. Now, though, the generative AI boom, with its chatbot boyfriends and AI influencers, is inspiring Menczer to see the theory in a new light. He still doesn’t take the idea literally, but he is, as they say, beginning to take its underlying message seriously. “Am I worried?” he asks. “Yes, I’m very worried.”
Last year, Renée DiResta, a leading misinformation researcher, and Josh Goldstein, a research fellow at Georgetown University, set out to study the use of AI-generated content in spam and scams. They zeroed in on more than 100 Facebook pages loaded with dozens of AI images each, which together had millions of followers. Some included fake photos of miniature cows that directed followers to scammy sites where they could supposedly buy them. Others included idyllic images of tiny homes and log cabins, which drove people to ad-filled websites.
These efforts follow in a long tradition of creating so-called content farms to make money from digital ads. With generative AI, the process of stocking those farms has become a lot more efficient. Not only that, but ad industry research shows that generative AI is making it easier for bots to simulate authentic user activity, making it look like real people are clicking on those ads.
In their paper, DiResta and Goldstein identified many of the Facebook pages by the copied-and-pasted captions they shared. “This is my first cake! I will be glad for your marks,” read one caption on at least 18 different images of 18 different AI-generated people posing with 18 different cakes. The pages attracted human followers, who often weren’t in on the act. Even more baffling were
In some cases, the motivation behind slop isn’t simply commercial. Russian disinformation network Pravda, for example, has published millions of articles on hundreds of newly created websites since Russia invaded Ukraine, perhaps in an attempt to manipulate the AI models themselves by churning out staggering amounts of propaganda designed for AI crawlers to ingest. Recently the media watchdog NewsGuard found references to those sites turning up in answers generated by leading chatbots. Along with the enshittifcation of everything thanks to ads creeping up, down, and sideways on every page, including “Don’t be Evil” Google and “Work Hard, Have Fun” Amazon, we now have “slop”, some created for the purpose of eyeball monitization, some to gain influence(r)s, some for pure propaganda purposes, and a bunch to create synthetic AI training grounds, poking around for real human answers to obviously false memes.
If your internet experience hasn’t been getting worse, then you’re just now trying hard enough.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-08...
