You have probably seen images on your social networks that look like a mixture of photography and computer -generated graphics. Some are fantastic, such as JESUS CAMARÓNand others seem credible to the naked eye, like the girl who hugged a puppy into a boat during an flood.
These are examples of junk content of AI: low to medium material (video, images, audio, text or a combination of both) created with AI tools, often with little consideration for precision. Creating this type of content is fast, easy and economical.
Those who produce this IA garbage usually publish it on social networks to exploit the economy of attention on the Internet, displacing higher quality material that could be more useful.
The disorganization of AI increased in recent years. As its name indicates, this is generally not good for those who use the Internet.
The multiple forms of the garbage of AI
The Guardian He published an analysis in July 2025 that examines how the garbage generated by Ia is taking over the youtube channels with the highest growth. The journalists discovered that nine of the 100 channels with the greatest increase in subscribers have content generated by AI, such as zombie football and soap operas on cats.
Do you listen to Spotify? Distrust that new band, The Velvet Sundownwhich appeared in the streaming service with a creative history and derived songs generated by Ia.
In many cases, people send AI content good enough to attract and maintain user attention, which allows the sender to benefit from the platforms that monetize transmission and content based on visualizations.
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The ease of generating content with AI also allows you to send low quality items to publications. Clarkesworldan online science fiction magazine that accepts user shipments and pays its collaborators, stopped accepting new shipments in 2024 due to the avalanche of texts generated by the IA that it received.
These are not the only places where this happens. Even Wikipedia faces low quality content generated by AI, which overloads the entire moderation system of its community. If the organization fails to eliminate it, a key source of information on which many people depend will be at risk.
Other AI damage
The garbage generated by AI is also infiltrating the media diet of users. During Hurricane Helene, the opponents of President Joe Biden cited images generated by a child displaced with a puppy in arms as proof of the alleged poor management of the administration in the response to the disaster. Even when it is evident that the content is generated by AI, it can be used to spread misinformation and deceive those who see it quickly.
Ia’s garbage also harms artists, since it causes labor and financial losses and displaces the content created by true creators. The location of this low quality content generated by the often is not recognized by the algorithms that drive consumption in social networks, displacing entire classes of creators who previously earned a living with online content.
When enabled, you can mark harmful or problematic content. On some platforms, you can add community notes to the content to contextualize it. If the content is harmful, you can try to report it.
In addition to forcing us to be alert to the deepfakes And the “non -authentic” accounts in social networks, AI is generating lots of garbage that degrade our media environment. At least it has an attractive name.
*Man nemeroff He is deputy director of Innovations in Learning, Teaching and Technology, University of Quinnipiac.
This article was originally published in The Conversation
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