A rain-soaked street at dusk, pictured through the window of a coffee shop. String lights hang between old brick buildings, a church steeple in the distance. In the foreground, a candlelit table with coffee mugs, tea, and a corked glass jug of … beige liquid? Next to the floating hunk of sour dal? And the table covered in water?
It follows the Platonic ideal of “autumn”. A picture has gone viral Both on X, where it’s been viewed nearly 12 million times, and Pinterest, where it’s very first picture It comes up when you search for “fall inspo”. At first glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking it looks like a small street in Edinburgh or part of Boston Gilmore Girls. But like other viral autumn vibe photos this year, the image, with its absurd details and strange glow, appears to be AI-generated.
AI “Autumn Vibes” imagery generates a ton of the most popular fall photos on Pinterest right now Mood outdoor book display Another rain-soaked street in the sunlight Farmer’s market Several examples of coffee cups placed on tossed bedspreads. They all look normal until you zoom in and realize the books Do not contain actual characters And the pillow is actually made Bath mat material.
It’s not just limited to Pinterest or “vibes”: AI-generated content is now infiltrating social media in ways that have a meaningful impact on people’s lives. Knitters and crocheters who want to make fall sweaters are inundated Absurd AI patterns and inspo images on reddit. A Totally fake restaurant Gained 75,000 followers on Instagram by claiming to be “Number One in Austin” and posting over-the-top seasonal food items Croissants shaped like moo deng. Meanwhile, people hoping to curl up with a cozy fantasy novel or bedtime story for their kids have encountered a library of them. Chat is GPT-generated nonsense Kindle bookstores are “written” by authors who don’t exist, while their YouTube algorithms serve them up Bot-generated fall environment videos. Autumn, it seems, is being eaten by the AI.
Not everyone — and please excuse the pun below — falls for it. When the photo of the fake cafe went viral on X, it sparked a flood of quote-tweets asking why anyone should use AI? Just as easily a post Among the many real photos taken in real cities that actually look like this
At the heart of the issue is its sheer scale: scammers and spammers can unleash a barrage of text and images with the click of a button.
Conversation, this is all rubbish Widely considered “slop,Spammy is a term for AI-generated images, text and videos that clog up internet platforms and make being online more difficult and unpleasant than ever before. In reality, this moment of top slop is the natural end of platforms that encourage virality and engagement at all costs — no matter how low-quality the content. But the crux of the issue is its sheer scale: Scammers and spammers can unleash a barrage of text and images with the click of a button, making it more time-consuming to search for legitimate information or a casual scroll through social media and efforts to bypass the junk. Misinformation about Important news events And Election coverage Spreading on the platform. Academic and literary publications are being spammed with low-quality submissions, making it difficult to find genuine creative or scholarly work.
Of course, there are more pressing concerns about the rise of generative AI: its massive energy consumption, for one, or the mass creation of deepfake porn used to harass and abuse women. Considering all that, it’s easy to see the cute AI-generated fall photos on Pinterest as a relative non-issue, a side effect of a technology that could (arguably) greatly benefit mankind.
But as co-founder Jason Koebler 404 mediaA publication covering technology, explains, these images normalize AI slop and desensitize our ability to discern what’s real and what’s fake. “The blocking of feeds and search results is not just a side effect, but a major effect of all of this,” he told me. “It’s hard for a journalist to write an article, or an artist to paint a picture, or a musician to create a song, when they’re not just competing with some human-made stuff, but with people who are using these automated creations. Machines Creating things on a scale that would otherwise be impossible.” The problem is so bad that tools used to track people’s use of certain words online No longer effective Due to the prevalence of large language models.
AI slop usually comes from people trying to make money by going viral on social media. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok all have programs that pay creators directly based on how engaging their content is, and AI is making it easier than ever to create and test that content. This has led to an entire cottage industry of people around the world teaching paid courses on how to create highly engaging AI slop, sharing information on the best prompts to create the most attention-grabbing posts.
On Facebook, AI posters Say they make About $100 per 1,000 likes, and some TikTokers are Earns $5,000 per month In their side hustle. This is a decent amount for anyone but especially lucrative in countries where many AI content hustlers are based, such as India, Vietnam and the Philippines. A Kenya based manufacturer told New York magazine That his process involves asking ChatGPT something like, “Jesus write me 10 prompt images that will drive high engagement on Facebook” and then plugging those prompts into an image generator like Leonardo.ai and Midjourney.
Instead of worrying about their platforms being overrun with low-quality engagement bait, Meta and X seem completely unconcerned and even supportive of it. “There seems to be very little interest from any platform to take action about these things,” Kobler said. “They’re actively, in some cases, building it themselves, and ‘Look how cool this technology is!'”
There are both Meta and X Invested a lot In AIOffers users the tools to add a growing deluge of slop to their platform Meta’s official account Even posted an AI picture Northern Lights of San Francisco thread – The top answer is a NASA engineer explaining why such images spread false information and “muddy the waters of reality.”
AI slop will exist as long as people find ways to make money off of it, just like any social media practice, from the merely annoying to the downright dangerous. Koebler speculates that AI spam has become so popular because some platforms have cracked down on content stolen from actual creators, making AI a second-easy option for spammers.
“Regardless of human quality level, people are posting whatever they’re getting from these AI generator machines,” he says, “the way virality and social media algorithms work, even if you have the greatest content in the world, it might not go viral. Where things can happen that aren’t very good, because you win the luck of the draw.”
There’s a particular irony with AI-generated collapse vibration images, considering The fall is invisible from many parts of the United States and AI emissions have become a major contributor For climate change.
And it’s not like the Internet is starved for aesthetically pleasing fall inspo: Every September, social media is flooded with images of pumpkin-strewn stoops, cozy couches with cozy blankets, or small towns covered in yellow and orange leaves. Over the past few years, we’ve named these mini-moments online: Meg Ryan Fall, which has its own outfit and playlist recommendations., Or Christian Girl Autumn, where people express their inner white woman in wide-brimmed hats and knee-high boots to clutch pumpkin spice lattes. (This year, it seems (The Gilmores’ fictional Connecticut town of Star Hollow provides much of the inspiration.)
It’s all very clever and wholesome, but even this kind of man-made content is little more than a ploy to get viewers to click on affiliate links to Amazon storefronts or ultra-cheap TikTok shop junk. In this way, they’re no different from AI slop: platforms are encouraging their users to become professional salespeople, whether they’re spamming viewers with ethically made clothing and home goods or AI-generated inspo photos. Both are low-quality, quick-to-produce content that drives engagement and, therefore, revenue, even when regular users say they hate it.
Part of the joy of scrolling through fall photos, after all, is knowing that these places exist and you could theoretically visit them, that the world essentially changes in fall, and that there’s only a small window to marvel at how beautiful it all is, all an AI-generated. The image represents the exact opposite: it’s just one of an infinite number of possible arrangements of pixels for the machine to continue churning indefinitely.
