What is Slopaganda?
The evolution of telecommunications, the web, and social media platforms created informational overload. Simultaneously, advances in artificial intelligence enabled information personalisation. The confluence of these led to slopaganda and the slopaganda entrepreneur. Slopaganda refers to mass-produced, personalised AI-generated content designed to manipulate beliefs and overwhelm the information ecosystem.
Original research
Slopaganda: The interaction between propaganda and generative AI
Abstract
At least since Francis Bacon, the slogan "knowledge is power" has been used to capture the relationship between decision-making at a group level and information. Being able to shape the informational environment for a group is a way to shape their decisions. This paper focuses on strategies that are intentionally designed to impact the decision-making capacities of groups.
Among these strategies, the best known are political rhetoric, propaganda, and misinformation. We bring out a relatively new strategy: slopaganda. According to The Guardian, News Corp Australia is currently churning out 3000 "local" generative AI stories each week. In the coming years, such "generative AI slop" will present multiple knowledge-related epistemic challenges.
We draw on contemporary research in cognitive science and artificial intelligence to diagnose the problem of slopaganda, describe recent troubling cases, then suggest several interventions that may help counter slopaganda.
Authors
What we show
- A precise definition of slopaganda in the AI age
- The mechanics of mass-produced, personalized AI content designed to manipulate
- Contemporary interventions to counter the epistemic challenges