{"slug": "i-don-t-care-if-web-content-is-ai-generated", "title": "I don't care if web content is AI-generated", "summary": "A writer argues that concerns about AI-generated web content are overblown, noting that human-generated content is often inaccurate or inauthentic as well. The author contends that AI slop is not fundamentally different from human slop, and that emotional impact matters more than authorship.", "body_md": "# Why I don’t really care if web content is AI-generated\n\nI’ve noticed people taking an interest in the “small net” or “small web” because they’re fed up with the amount of material on the mainstream web which is generated by large language models (LLMs) and the like. They complain about “AI slop”, which I take to mean poor-quality, low-effort, unoriginal content.\n\nThere *is* a lot of this kind of material on the mainstream\nweb; it’s hard to be sure exactly how much, because authorship is often\nconcealed. “Slop” is now starting to appear on the “small” web, too – so\nit might not always be the refuge it once was. But that’s a matter for\nanother day.\n\nI confess to a visceral distaste for AI-generated content, but I can’t really explain why. I’ve noticed, thought, that that many other people who find AI troubling also can’t explain why. When they try, the most common complaints I hear are that\n\n- AI-generated content might be inaccurate, or\n- it’s “inauthentic”, or\n- it’s not clear that AI was used in the authoring.\n\nLet’s consider these contentions, one by one.\n\n## Is AI-generated content inaccurate?\n\nWell, yes, it often is. But a lot of human-generated content is inaccurate, too. Social media, in particular, carries a lot of poorly-researched material that lacks nuance. Sometimes there is deliberate, wanton misinformation. LLMs can produce false and misleading information – but only because they’ve been trained on such material. So far as I know, an LLM can’t (yet) act in bad faith – immorality requires the special creativity of the human mind.\n\nLLMs are actually quite good at aggregating and summarizing large volumes of information. It’s true that they lack discernment; that is, they’re unable to distinguish fine shades of meaning. But, frankly, many people are not sufficiently analytical in their reading, either. Critical assessment of information isn’t taught widely enough, from a young enough age, but it should be.\n\nIn short, while there is a lot of “AI slop” around, there’s an awful lot of “human slop”, too – along with human deliberate mischief-making and sometimes outright wickedness.\n\n## Is AI-generated content inauthentic?\n\nI recently read on a web forum a moving account of a woman’s heroic – and ultimately unsuccessful – struggle with cancer, written by her husband of thirty years. Almost before my tears had dried, somebody else had posted that the same text appeared under different names in at least three different places, and was “AI slop”. People with a nose for that kind of thing seem to be able to recognize the signs, even though I did not.\n\nWhat makes this sort of thing offensive? This AI-generated story was\n*true*, in the sense that it was an aggregate of real human\nexperiences, as derived from the LLM’s training data. There wasn’t a\nreal, named human being undergoing the pain and loss but, sadly, there\n*are* such people. If the story had been written directly by a\nhuman, I doubt the writer would be somebody I knew personally, who could\nconfirm that all the details were true (even if I were heartless enough\nto ask).\n\nIn short, the impact of this story on me, personally, would have been the same, whoever or whatever wrote it. So why is there a problem if it’s AI-generated?\n\nFundamentally, I think the issue is that we don’t like to be made to\nsympathize with somebody who isn’t real. No, we *do* like that:\nwe like it in fiction. We just don’t like it when the story purports to\nbe factual. It takes emotional energy to empathise. Why it does, when\nthe writer is a complete stranger to us, is something I’m still\nstruggling to understand.\n\nI struggle even more to understand why people claim AI-generated\ncontent is unauthentic even when it’s *fiction*: fiction is\ninauthentic by its very nature, whoever writes it. I doubt that Charles\nDickens ever had the experience of waiting in line to be guillotined,\nbut we don’t criticise him for writing as if he had, because *A Tale\nof Two Cities* is a work of fiction. I’d argue that being able to\nlive another person’s experiences is a key skill for a novelist,\nwhatever those experiences are.\n\nOf course, an LLM doesn’t have *any* experiences – it’s a\nmachine. But what an LLM can do is to aggregate the experiences of human\nwriters. The results of this process might be a bit bland, but they’re\nno less authentic than any other work of fiction.\n\n## Does it matter whether we know AI was used?\n\nIt certainly matters to many people. I suspect these people want to know that AI was used because then they don’t have to read the content. If you think it’s likely to be inaccurate or “inauthentic”, you’ll certainly save time by skipping over it.\n\nSome people won’t read AI-generated content as a matter of principle,\nwhether it might be useful or not. If you think AI is taking people’s\njobs, for example, I can see why you might eschew it completely. I’m\nsure AI *is* taking people’s jobs. Database company Oracle\nannounced earlier this week that it was laying off 10% of its workforce,\nciting “increased uptake of AI” as the reason. Whether AI will create a\ncompensating number of new job roles remains to be seen.\n\nWhether I read the AI-generated summary of this morning’s news stories, or skip it and search for something more human, I doubt it will change the uptake of AI in the IT industry. Nevertheless, I can understand why opponents of AI might not want to be complicit in this hostile takeover.\n\nSo it seems to me that it’s just common courtesy for a publisher to indicate how AI was involved, given that many people seem to want to know.\n\nBut it doesn’t really matter much to me.\n\n## Why I don’t care\n\nThe complaints about AI in web-based publishing seem to me to have at least some merit. So why do I find that I’m not particularly worried?\n\nFor my part, I divide *all* on-line content into two classes:\nmaterial written by a known individual (or organization) that I trust,\nand everything else, in a ratio of about 1:1000. In the “everything\nelse” category I find that I don’t really distinguish between human and\nAI-generated content: *everything* falls to be assessed on its\nown merits. Some AI-generated content is informative and entertaining,\nbut not much; but the same applies to human-generated content. I think\nit’s a grave error to assume that human-generated content is *a\npriori* more likely to be accurate than AI content: very few\nindividuals produce material that I trust without detailed scrutiny, and\nit takes a long time for any writer to make it onto my trustworthy\nlist.\n\nIt seems plausible to me that the category of “known individuals I trust” might one day encompass AI agents. If the AI consistently produces information that turns out to be true, useful, or entertaining, I can see how I might one day accept it as an “individual” for practical purposes. That won’t happen easily, but I don’t easily trust human writers, either.\n\nWe’re living at the end of the “Gutenberg parenthesis”. This was the time period – short in terms of human history – during which information was managed institutionally. Until the invention of the printing press, information was largely transmitted orally, and held communally. Printing allowed information to be centralized – exploited, some might say – by large institutions that could afford printing. These institutions had strong, financial incentives to print stuff that was essentially accurate. In my youth, “I read it in a book” was more-or-less a knock-down argument that some fact was true. Before we realized the way the Internet was going, we carelessly extended the same reasoning to web-based content, whose authors had no particular incentive to share only truthful information.\n\nThe Internet has made information communal again, but we haven’t yet (re-)learned the skills we need to handle this kind of information properly. It’s no longer obvious which sources can be trusted, and we don’t yet have robust methods to find out.\n\nAs a result, scepticism about *all* on-line information is\njustified, whether it’s the product of the human mind or a machine.\n\nIn short, I’m not worried about AI-generated web content because we\nneed to learn to think about information in pre-Gutenberg terms *with\nor without AI*.\n\n*Have you posted something in response to this page?\nFeel free to send a webmention\nto notify me, giving the URL of the blog or page that refers to\nthis one.*", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-don-t-care-if-web-content-is-ai-generated", "canonical_source": "https://kevinboone.me/ai.html", "published_at": "2026-06-24 13:59:11+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-24 14:09:49.627165+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["large-language-models", "ai-ethics", "generative-ai"], "entities": ["Charles Dickens"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-don-t-care-if-web-content-is-ai-generated", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-don-t-care-if-web-content-is-ai-generated.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-don-t-care-if-web-content-is-ai-generated.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-don-t-care-if-web-content-is-ai-generated.jsonld"}}