So we're now living in a time where half the users on social media sites are bots, and most of the content you see online are either misinformation or AI-generated and you have no idea whether what you're seeing is real or not.
People used to call these things "fake news" but the problem has gotten so normalized at this point I think people just gave up and resigned to the fact that we live in a "post-truth" world now.
So there is actually a solution to this problem already there - which is to use blockchain-based content management systems to validate the origins and authenticity of every post - so trusted sources can "sign off" on "real" content that they produce and the reader can have reassurance that the content they're getting is actually coming from the place they think it is - no questions asked.
The tech to do this (NFTs) have been around for a while and wouldn't actually be all that hard to set up. The problem? Web2's business models are designed to incentivize volume (clicks, likes, shares, etc.), not quality - and the whole tech industry just let that system run amok for the last 10-20 years. Bot traffic, fake news, illegal activity, AI-generated slop - they all just serve to pad their numbers for advertiser dollars, after all.
Most places - whether it was publications, tech platforms, VCs, government entities, big corporations - they all failed to address the "fake news" problem in a meaningful way because they were making money from slop monetization so they didn't see any reason to innovate or adapt. But the race to the bottom has gotten so bad to the point where we're starting to see the whole model collapse from underneath after decades of neglect - short-term thinking at its finest, really.
Well, no matter. The stuff we make on @TeiaCommunity will do the simple things that nobody bothered to do. I've been criticized in the past for taking the whole on-chain thing "too far" but it's becoming very apparent now that it wasn't taken far enough. Someone's going to have to replace the thing when it comes all crashing down. It's really only a matter of time...
Well, there is one good thing about the slop that's around - I can just take AI images like these freely, without having to worry about pesky things like IP or copyright..."information wants to be free", amirite? Though to me, when I hear "free", I hear "cheap". That's the slop-on-slop world we currently live in today.