If you are looking to take significant steps into AI usage, listening to teens (and 20-somethings) may be your best AI entry strategy. Learning the tools and processes are one thing. Foreseeing the pitfalls and saving time avoiding them are quite another.
The fact is the young person between the ages of 15 and 25 in your life likely knows significantly more about AI and its uses than you do. While you are concerned about whether you should use Chat GPT to write an email, one of those teens you know has likely already fed it a textbook, had it write a report, scanned it with an AI checker, then run it through “humanizing” software to cover their tracks. (Don’t worry, they’re using for good as well!)
What the younger set knows even more about is consuming content, and where AI fits in that context. If you have yet to hear the term “AI slop,” you’re not talking to young people enough. It’s also a phrase you are going to come to know.
It seems the age group spending all that time on TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat is already growing tired of every other piece of content thrown at them being AI generated. It is not just that the content was created by AI, it is also the issue of it being low quality and often intended to mislead or simply generate enough clicks to make the creator some money. Even if you are older, you are seeing it. A few examples:
- Lengthy articles containing complete falsehoods. We’ve all seen the one about pro athlete X paying for the funeral of victim Y in the latest high-profile disaster or shooting. The trouble is that a day later there is a different athlete or famous person named in the same story performing the identical good deed. It’s all crap.
- Deep fake images. Remember the crying little girl with the puppy after Hurricane Helena in 2024. The picture was bogus and was simply a precursor to endless fakes that we are seeing today. Now we’ve got famous musicians visiting a child’s hospital room to play a duet. (Note to AI: Paul McCartney is a left-handed guitarist.)
- Crazy videos of all sorts, some designed to look real, others simply to be bizarre. A personal favorite is the ad campaign for us middle-aged types for tai-chi exercises hosted by the 50-something Asian guy built like Adonnis promising I will look just like him in fifty days. How much?! Where to I sign?
But it is worse for those who are younger and spending more time on social media. Now it is getting to the point of backlash. In just the last two weeks, I have had my sixteen-year-old begrudgingly express support for the recently enacted state law banning phones during school. She says it is giving her a break from all the slop spewing out of her device. Days later her twenty-year-old brother told me he now puts his phone on “do not disturb” for the entire day until his college classes are over.
“It’s the whole dopamine thing,” he told me. “All the crap coming through leaves you not wanting to do anything. I feel better without it.”
So, what is the message here for those of us in the communications world? I would suggest it is, “Don’t overuse the tool.” If you are like me you are inundated with ads for different AI applications that will write your emails, do your social media, create your videos, and probably iron your underwear if you let it.
Meanwhile, younger people, those who are the next generation of consumers, are already getting sick of it. My son referred to a professor who “writes” all his emails and does his presentation slides with AI.
“It’s poor quality and really cringe,” he says, somewhat exasperated by the fact that we are paying for this in the world of academia.
If they are tired of it already, a total backlash could be coming next. You should be cognizant of this when utilizing one of these tools.
I’m not saying to avoid AI. Quite the opposite. There are amazing uses for AI applications that can up your efficiency, help you serve customers better, and allow for innovative ways to create visuals that once would have cost millions of dollars. There is a lot of good, but it is the high-quality side of the AI equation where you need to focus.
Beware the slop. Today’s students are tomorrow’s key audience, and they are already telling us they won’t put up with it for long.
If you want to talk communications and PR strategy, and where AI tools might or might not fit, give us a buzz here at Chemistry PR and Multimedia!
By the way, if you want to do a deeper dive into the world of slop, John Oliver nails it as usual.
