As a disclaimer, I’m not actually anti-AI, but tons of slop is made with it. It’s the same as those TTS Reddit reading videos from back in the day or any other shitty trend from the last 10 years.
I’m old enough to know to dismiss internet noise as vastly out of touch with the actual silent majority of internet users, so this moral panic over slop to me was just zoomers who grew up on reaction videos thinking that wasn’t slop to the folks who came before, but I was on a train, looking around, I saw like 4/5 people I could see were on their phones, watching clearly AI-generated content, on TikTok or something similar based on the UI elements, one of them even had it on speaker for some reason.
All of them seemed around my age in the mid-20s.
Thing is, I don’t really understand it, what’s the appeal? I’m not asking about being on your phone, but specifically short-form videos about nothing specific.
When I looked it up, lots of talk about addiction and dopamine loops, but I can’t relate to that, I assume this maybe has something to do with me having ADHD and the theory that my dopamine system doesn’t really work “normally”.
I tried watching TikTok before, but it definitely wasn’t stimulating for me, I got bored pretty quick. If I was on a train and really bored looking out the window listening to music, I’d whip out a Wikipedia page or read the comments on Lemmy or look up a random question on my mind.
Why? Well in my experience - text is a lot easier to consume you can consume more information faster, hence to me - it’s more stimulating. Works both ways too - It’s just easier to express yourself quickly and clearly in text than by speaking. Even typing on my phone feels a helluva lot less taxing and more stimulating than speaking/listening.
It’s not like I don’t watch videos, I do have videos on in the background sometimes when I’m tidying up or whatever, where I prefer long-form stuff so it just fades into the background and stays consistent and non-distracting. If I watch a movie it’s often something I kinda need to mentally work myself up for. I definitely wouldn’t be able to pay attention to a video playing on my phone.
So my question is - what’s so stimulating about this type of stuff in particular?
I want to hear about your experience so I can understand it better.
I’d like to understand it, because otherwise it feels like most people are weird aliens, driven by forces beyond my comprehension, and it’s not nice :(
I think there is a differentiation that needs to be made here. Your described experience with short form video/ social media as a neurodiverse person and the response to AI generated content. To my knowledge social media and short form video platforms are designed to release as much dopamine, but whether the type of content is AI or not isn’t necessarily important here. I am not sure about this, but I believe many of my peers who are neurodivers enjoy tiktok. So there may not be a clear difference between neurodiverse and neurotypical people, not to say that your experience isn’t valid. It is.
Instead I think tech literacy and political believes might be at play here. First of to identify well made AI content as such and secondly, the general response to it (intrest/no interest/political and moral concerns). Further more I think AI content might be pushed to users due to their controversial standing which might result in lots of discussion in the comments. TikToks users are on average also fairly young and might not filter content as much as older users would. Lastly it is easy to publish a lot of AI generated content due to automation. The more AI content gets uploaded the higher the likelyhood of it being recommended to users.