Let us filter AI slop, you cowards

It’s almost impossible to avoid seeing AI-generated content online, but it doesn’t have to be this way. YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and more have ramped up content authentication efforts over the last year, with many now automatically applying labels to distinguish AI-generated images, videos, and music from those made by real, human creators.

That’s all very well and good if we’re just stumbling across labeled content at random, but you know what would be better? Letting us filter out the AI slop.

Current labeling efforts haven’t meaningfully changed how content is presented online. You may notice that some TikTok or YouTube videos in your feeds now have AI disclosures in the description, or information labels overlaid onto the clip itself. Meta takes a similar approach by applying “AI info” labels to images on Facebook and Instagram that carry identifying AI metadata or voluntary disclosures from the creators.

But if you want to actually avoid seeing anything tagged with such labels — which is justifiable, given the brain rot it induces on top of the ethical and environmental concerns around generative AI — it’s actually incredibly difficult to do so. A filter would easily solve this. All we need is an “AI” checkbox to toggle.

I reached out to Meta, Google, TikTok, and Spotify to ask if they have plans to let users filter the various content they’ve been authenticating with AI labeling systems. TikTok and Spotify never responded, and Google said it had nothing to share. Meta didn’t provide an attributable comment. But to summarize, none of these companies said “yes.”

One of the only online platforms that I’ve seen with an AI content filter is DeviantArt, and its implementation is extremely telling. For one, you can’t access it on DeviantArt’s feeds or store page, so it feels somewhat hidden away. Instead, you have to make an account and then hover over your user icon at the top-right of the page to find the “AI Content Settings” menu. From there, you only have two options: the default “Show AI” setting, or the “Suppress AI” option that claims you’ll see “fewer instances” of AI-generated or manipulated imagery.

Having tried both options, I, unfortunately, don’t see a notable difference. I’ve got a pretty good eye for spotting AI-generated “digital illustrations” at this point, but I didn’t have to rely on my suspicions alone — almost every dubious image I selected included a creator’s disclosure in the description that confirmed the work was spat out by a robot. DeviantArt does a poor job of automatically applying AI labels to images with metadata that clearly indicates AI provenance.

Pinterest has a similar system in place. Users who are signed into a Pinterest account can click on the settings icon, select “Refine your recommendations,” and then tap the “AI content” tab to toggle specific categories, including art, beauty, fashion, and home decor. Disabling any of these options will show you “less AI-modified content” for that particular category, according to Pinterest, but in my experience, it’s far from perfect. The setting is also arguably harder to find than a filter built into Pinterest’s feeds. I still saw plenty of images with suspicious AI tells (including uncannily perfect photography models and unexplainable illustration errors), despite the AI filters being maxed out.

And that is almost certainly what will happen if other platforms like YouTube or Instagram introduce an AI content filter: It won’t work very well. But that’s okay because it would expose the ineffective “solutions” our AI emperors dress themselves in. They exist, on paper, to appease regulators and critics, but do little to address the actual problem of distinguishing AI fakery from authentic photography and creative works.

And platforms do know it’s a problem. Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in December that “authenticity is becoming a scarce resource” amid the rise in AI-generated content. And now we have Google CEO Sundar Pichai admitting in a recent Decoder interview that “there’s a lot of AI slop out there,” and that online users need to “adapt to it.” Okay, give us filters.

Provenance-based systems like C2PA and SynthID work by embedding metadata or invisible watermarks into content at the point of creation. But there are plenty of open-source AI models that don’t do this (especially if they’re designed for nefarious purposes), and even then, metadata can be stripped out too easily to make this dependable. There are also detection-based methods that analyze patterns in digital content and then rate the likelihood that AI was used to create it, but these can provide false positives. None of this currently works effectively at scale.

Nevertheless, companies, including AI providers like OpenAI, are currently heralding those AI labeling solutions as something that will help prevent people from being duped by deepfakes and other misleading fakery. If regulators caught wind of how ineffective they are, then online platforms and AI providers may need to actually find a solution that does work, instead of what currently feels like a smokescreen.

Platforms will argue that they risk incorrectly flagging authentic content if they push labeling initiatives too hard. Both Meta and YouTube found out the hard way after applying AI labels to images and videos that creators said were produced without the help of such tools. If that’s such a concern for current labeling systems, then find a better solution. Surely improving the user experience for your millions of users is a worthwhile investment to fend off competition?

And while I’m asking, why can’t I report all the unlabeled AI slop I see every day? Given the scale of the issue — with a study by Kapwing last year finding that more than 20 percent of YouTube videos shown to new users is low-quality generated slop, for example — I imagine a lot of human moderators would be required to effectively vet each report.

And perhaps that’s the rub. At a time when big tech is replacing workers with AI that can supposedly outperform them, can it afford to backtrack on its carefully constructed narrative by hiring them back to fix AI’s problems? Humans tend to have pesky requirements like salaries and benefits, compared to automated moderation systems that lack nuanced investigation skills.

An alternative to labeling AI-generated content would be to start labeling verified human creators instead. That wouldn’t necessarily identify synthetic content posted by those creators, but it could help us to see less from unverified content farms that churn out low-quality slop. This is the future that Instagram’s Mosseri pitched for Meta’s image-sharing platform and something that Spotify is already doing with Verified artists.

Of course, Meta, Spotify, and Google don’t just host AI-generated imagery, ads, and music; they’re also responsible for making the tools that create it. That’s why they insist that not all AI content is slop and that it’s more an issue of quality — if it gets convincing enough, they’re hoping you won’t notice and keep happily slurping from the trough. Allowing users to filter it out regardless would go against all the effort these platforms have undertaken to profit from AI: They want you to embrace the slop factory.

I’m happy to be proven wrong. I’m actually outright pleading for online platforms to prove that AI labeling efforts haven’t been a waste of time. But right now, they hold all the cards and we’re left to just hope that their AI moderation efforts are up to snuff. So give us a basic “no AI” or “verified human creator” filter and we’ll be the judge of how well this is actually going.