Let’s start by heading back to the beginning.

The early days

My web publishing journey began in 1996 after I left college and first picked up an HTML coding book. The internet was very new and cool at that time, and I enjoyed playing around with layouts, colours, fonts and graphical elements. It engaged the creative side of my brain.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I found myself working as a web designer for an internet service provider. The era of free dial-up access had just begun, and more people than ever were going online.

This was a time when Internet Explorer was a frustrating foe, and no website seemed complete without flashing animated GIFs.

(Come on, cat, catch that insect!)

It was in 1998 that Google launched its search engine, and I remember that time well. Here was this upstart company challenging established players like AltaVista, Hotbot, Excite, and Yahoo! The bright, playful colours of their logo and website felt revolutionary and fresh, and their ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button seemed cool.

Little did I realise at the time how enormous and powerful Google would become and what an influence it would have on my future businesses.

The Google dependency trap

For the last twenty years, web publishers have relied on Google for website traffic. Google has dominated the search market, meaning that for publishers like me, every algorithm update has felt like a game of roulette.

Survive an update unscathed and – big sigh of relief – you live to fight another day. Get hit by a penalty or demoted in the rankings, and you face potentially devastating traffic losses.

For people running online businesses, livelihoods and jobs have continually depended on the decisions and algorithms of a single powerful company.

Since the turn of the century, Google has dominated online search with over 90% market share. Only recently, with the emergence of AI chatbots, has this figure dipped below 90%. And this dip was a crucial one because it woke Google up to the threat that AI chatbots such as ChatGPT pose to their core search business. Their response? AI Overviews.

Publishers have, of course, become accustomed to competing with Google’s own products and features in search results over the years. Features such as Sponsored links (ads), Google Shopping, Featured Snippets, Knowledge Panels, ‘People Also Ask’ boxes, YouTube videos and Google’s own conversion tools – all pushing organic search results further down the page.

But here’s the important thing. Google’s AI Overviews now pose a significantly greater threat because of the way in which they provide comprehensive responses to users’ searches.

What are AI Overviews?

AI Overviews are blocks of text that provide direct answers and summaries to a user’s search. If you search for ‘how to poach an egg’, you’ll receive an AI-generated summary containing specific instructions for how to boil the water, crack the egg and cook it. Google includes links to the sources it has used for the information, but most users never need to click them because the answer is already there.

For users, it’s incredibly convenient. For publishers, however, it’s devastating. They spend time and money writing, creating and hosting their original content and receive nothing in return for its use.

As with all the best things in life, it helps to explain this situation with a cake analogy…

Imagine you own a cake shop and you spend all morning baking delicious cakes – lemon drizzle, chocolate and the classic Victoria sponge (your Granny’s recipe). One morning, someone comes into your shop, takes your cakes (without paying) and stands on the street outside giving away slices for free. They put up a small sign pointing people inside for more cake, but most people have had their appetite satisfied by their free slice and walk away. Only about 1 in 100 cake eaters come into your shop.

This comparison holds true – and the issue is more widespread than you might think. Allow me to demonstrate with the AI Overview that appears for my own name. I’m not doing this as an ego trip, by the way, but to highlight two issues:

1. AI Overviews now appear for countless searches. I’m hardly a household name (to say the least), yet Google still deems an AI Overview necessary for my search result, rather than just including a standard search listing for my website.

2. The information is prone to inaccuracies. This is something Google itself acknowledges. The text about me contains several mistakes. The biggest being that there’s more than one Alastair Hazell, and I’m not the author who spent time in Africa and published a book about the East African Slave Trade. In fact, I would argue that I’m the least interesting Alastair Hazell (go meet the other one, he sounds cool!).

Although I’m highlighting a single case here, numerous documented issues have been reported in recent months with AI Overviews giving false or misleading responses. One of the most famous is the suggestion to add glue to pizza to make the cheese stick. Mmm. Delicious.

This raises concerns that people might rely on these summaries as fact without verifying the original sources. It also risks something called circular reporting, where AI-generated misinformation gets cited by other sources and becomes falsely legitimised.

Making matters worse for publishers, it’s been reported that AI Overviews may be favouring certain larger platforms. Independent research suggests that content from Reddit, Quora, and YouTube (Google’s own video platform) gets cited in AI answers more frequently than independent blogs and publisher websites.

This creates a double blow for independent publishers - not only do AI Overviews reduce their traffic, but they may be less likely to be selected as sources in the first place.

The scale of the problem

So how big is the problem? Well, data from Advanced Web Ranking suggests AI Overviews now appear in more than 50% of all search results. We mentioned earlier that Google includes links to sources within the AI Overviews. However, a study from Pew Research Center suggests that as few as 1% of users click them.

The impact on traffic can be severe. Research by analytics firm Authoritas reveals that websites previously holding a top search ranking can experience traffic drops of up to 79% when their results appear beneath an AI Overview. And this makes absolute sense to me – why would anyone scroll below the AI Overview if it gives them all the information they need?

I do need to point out that Google disputes these findings, with a spokesperson calling the analysis “inaccurate and based on flawed assumptions.”

Google’s mixed signals

I must say that I find it challenging to properly gauge what Google thinks about AI Overviews and the Open Web because they seem to be sending out contradictory messages. For example, Nick Fox, Google’s senior vice president of knowledge, recently claimed on a podcast that “From our point of view, the web is thriving.”

Yet in a September 2025 court document, Google made a contrasting statement:

“The fact is that today, the open web is already in rapid decline and Plaintiffs’ divestiture proposal would only accelerate that decline, harming publishers who currently rely on open-web display advertising revenue.”

As The Verge noted, this may be a tactical move to appear weaker and less monopolistic in court. However, as someone who has worked in the online publishing world for over 25 years, I believe their statement on the Open Web is actually quite accurate.

As far as AI Overviews are concerned, Google’s stance appears to be that they are beneficial for publishers. Liz Reid, Head of Google Search, recently insisted:

“Overall, total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year... we’re actually sending slightly more quality clicks to websites than a year ago... This data contrasts with third-party reports that inaccurately suggest dramatic declines in aggregate traffic — often based on flawed methodologies, isolated examples, or traffic changes that occurred prior to the roll out of AI features in Search.”

Where does the AI Overview data come from?

As we touched on earlier with our cake shop analogy, Google must obtain the information for its AI Overviews from somewhere. And it gets it from publishers themselves. Effectively, Google’s systems crawl and index publishers’ content, which is then processed to generate AI Overview responses to search queries. It then includes small links through to publisher sources.

It’s something that’s summed up brilliantly in this humorous cartoon by Datch Haven at this ecommerce life.

In September, Penske Media, the owner of Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Variety, became the first major U.S. publisher to sue Google over the use of its content in AI-generated overviews. Penske Media says that revenue from affiliate sales has declined by more than one-third.

This could be the first of many lawsuits filed against Google. And I think the outcome could have significant repercussions for the independent web ecosystem. If things remain as they are, I believe we will see widespread layoffs in the online publishing industry as traffic and revenue decline, and costs have to be cut. This will inevitably lead to a reduction in both quality and output.

We also need to spare a thought for smaller publishers – single-person websites or those with only a handful of employees. What once made the internet such a special place – the independent websites and blogs – is being slowly destroyed. Many will pivot to generate traffic from social media, and some will succeed. But a lot of sites that rely on Google for their traffic and advertising revenue are suffering right now. The future for them looks tough unless significant changes occur.

Of course, I should point out that this isn’t solely a Google problem. Other search engines, such as Bing, have introduced similar AI summaries, while ChatGPT and other AI chatbots continue to gain users. Google may be thinking that removing AI Overviews would lead people to migrate to these competitors. AI Overviews are, after all, very convenient for users. But that convenience comes at a cost – and it’s publishers who are paying it.

The future

Given this competitive reality and user convenience, it seems likely that AI Overviews are here to stay. The question then becomes: how do we ensure fair compensation for publishers whose content powers them?

There are signs that publishers are starting to organise. The non-profit RSL Collective has developed open standards that enable machine-readable licensing terms for content, attracting the attention of major publishers including Yahoo!, Reddit, Medium and Quora. The idea behind RSL is that publishers can collectively negotiate compensation when AI systems crawl and use their work. This creates a framework for sustainable royalty streams rather than one-off deals. Like Apple Music for web publishing.

Some alternatives within the search sector are already implementing this kind of model. Kagi, the paid, privacy-focused search engine, has introduced proportional source attribution in its AI answers. Each source used for a response receives a percentage that indicates its contribution, and Kagi says it plans to utilise this technology to automatically share profits with publishers (with no contracts or deals required). Whilst Kagi’s market share is currently tiny compared to Google’s, it demonstrates that fairer models are technically possible.

As yet, Google, which dominates search, has shown no signs of adopting this kind of approach.

I believe the current situation is unsustainable: Publishers cannot provide content that powers AI services whilst receiving nothing back – especially when Google now runs ads within AI Overviews, generating revenue from their work.

The Penske Media lawsuit, and any others that follow, may prove pivotal in establishing legal precedents for content compensation. If successful, Google may be forced to completely rethink how its AI Overviews operate and how it compensates publishers for using their content. The RSL framework appears to be the ideal solution.

In summary

If we remain on this current course, we’re heading towards a dramatically diminished online publishing landscape, where publishers are left to fight over a shrinking pool of traffic.

There’s a real threat that much of the independent voices, journalism, niche expertise, and diverse perspectives that made the internet extraordinary will disappear or be marginalised. And what remains may be a corporate-controlled information landscape where only the largest publishers with significant influence and social media followings survive.

The clock is ticking.

The question isn’t whether the Open Web will change - it’s whether independent publishers will exist to be part of what comes next.

Alastair

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We’ll discuss how AI is blurring the lines between real and fake, with people increasingly believing things that aren't real, and, perhaps more worryingly, dismissing things that are. And we'll explore how our minds are being subtly shaped by the harmful combination of social media and AI.

But before we get into that, let me begin with a story.

Back in 2005, I was on safari in the Kruger National Park in South Africa, staring out at a pride of young lions as they stood ahead of our vehicle. Something in the distance had caught their attention. Whilst they gazed into the savanna, I noticed a speed sign positioned just to one side of them. Chuckling to myself, I grabbed my camera and captured the moment.

When I arrived back home, I entered the photograph into a local photographic competition – entirely for fun. When it came to judging time, the judge looked very closely at my photograph, speculated loudly that the sign might have been Photoshopped in, and swiftly moved on to the next entry.

I felt frustrated and, to be honest, a bit insulted.

After all, if I were going to Photoshop a sign in, I would have chosen something like this…

The judge had struggled to determine whether my genuine photograph was authentic or fake. So, he erred on the side of caution, perhaps not wanting to be made to look foolish.

Back in 2005, altering photographs required time, effort, and skill – three things I was famously short on. So, my image was entirely genuine.

Back to the future

Fast-forward twenty years, and we find ourselves plugged into a hyper-digital reality where photorealistic images and videos can be conjured up in less time than it takes to say "Hakuna Matata". All thanks to AI software like Midjourney.

Naturally, this is creating some growing problems. Firstly, since the launch of AI content generators, the internet has been deluged with AI slop (mass-produced, low-quality AI content). This is making it increasingly difficult for human-generated content to stand out – something I explored in my previous article. Pinterest offers a prime example of this, now dominated by AI-generated pins. Many users have dubbed this the Enshittification of Pinterest.

Side note: Enshittification was chosen as the Macquarie Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2024. Oxford chose ‘brain rot’, which is clearly ridiculous because it’s two words. ‘Brain rot’ beat off competition from ‘slop’, which was nominated because of the sharp rise in usage for describing exactly the kind of AI output we’re discussing here.

Of course, the sheer volume of AI slop being produced is not the only concerning aspect of this new technological age; there's another significant problem to consider. As the internet becomes flooded with high-quality, photo-realistic AI-generated images and videos, it's becoming increasingly hard for us, as human beings with little experience of this kind of synthetic content, to distinguish between what is real and what is fake.

Now, let’s be clear – fakery is not a brand-new problem – we have, after all, endured at least ten years of stock images featuring grinning strangers pointing at things that don’t exist.

But fakery has reached a new level of scale and sophistication since the arrival of AI, with potentially more harmful consequences. And nowhere has this manipulative content been spreading more rampantly than in the great digital cesspool of social media.

Of course, misinformation has been a problem on social media ever since its inception (in the bowels of Mordor), with posts misrepresenting stories and situations. The difference now is the sheer scale of it, as we face the unholy alliance of revenue-focused algorithms, the absence of oversight and, now, the development of AI.

When it comes to AI, machine learning models have rapidly reached an extraordinary level of creative mimicry, making it easier than ever to distort the truth and mislead. The sheer realism of AI-generated visuals means that falsehoods can be presented in ways that are far more convincing than ever before.

Why is this development in creative media so important?

Numerous scientific studies have suggested that humans are particularly susceptible to the influence of images and video because our perception is wired for pictures. Our brains process visual information far more quickly than text, and we tend to remember pictures more easily than words. This phenomenon is known as the picture superiority effect.

Studies have estimated that 90 per cent of the information transmitted to our brains is visual, and images are processed up to 60,000 times faster than text. This perhaps helps to explain why AI-generated visuals can be so persuasive and why misinformation, when presented in such a convincing visual form, can spread so effectively.

This psychological influence of visuals makes the current flood of AI-generated visual content particularly concerning. Consider what's happening on platforms like Facebook.

AI Slop in action

Facebook recently made the decision to remove its fact-checkers – a move that drew widespread criticism and backlash from disinformation experts, fact‑checking organisations and online-safety advocates. With the toxic combination of minimal oversight and the rapid expansion of AI, the platform is now awash with scams and clickbait. It only took me about ten seconds of scrolling my Feed to find this example...

Examine the images closely, and you can see they're AI-created. It's a fake set of AI-generated images accompanied by a nonsensical story, posted for clickbait purposes. The faces don't quite look right. But the fact is that these images are of a sufficiently high quality to deceive people – something evidenced by the number of reactions and shares on the post. The kicker is that every like, share or comment boosts the post’s perceived authenticity and drives the algorithm to show it to more people. Behold: the snowball effect.

So, we’ve mentioned the combination of AI plus algorithms. But there’s a third ingredient in the harmful mix: human nature. A 2018 study from MIT analysing millions of Twitter posts found that false news stories are 70% more likely to be shared than true stories, and spread six times faster than accurate information, not because of bots or algorithms, but because humans are more likely to pass them on.

When you combine this natural human tendency with algorithms designed to maximise engagement for ad revenue, and the ease with which realistic AI-generated content can now be produced, you have a perfect storm for an infodemic of misinformation and propaganda.

And it's worth remembering: AI is only going to get better at image and video creation – you only need to recognise how far it's come in just a couple of years to appreciate this.

Take, for example, this AI-generated image of a new Olympic event that I conceptualised back in August 2024 – Trampolining With Trifle…

And now compare it to this generated image from just a year later…

I’m now fully convinced this would be a world-class spectacle. Who wouldn’t tune in to watch this pudding pandemonium?

Back to Facebook (ugh, do I have to?). It’s worth taking a closer look at the sort of content that’s appearing on its platform. Meta's Q1 2025 Widely Viewed Content Report features several AI-generated images and videos in its ten most-viewed posts. This one, for example, ranks fourth in the list with 49.1 million views.

Less horse bread, more horse shit. I can’t decide whether it looks happy or just stale.

Take a second to glance at the number of reactions, comments and shares this post has received. You might be thinking, "Sure, it's fake, but isn't it just a harmless bit of fun?" Well, I’d argue it isn’t – for a couple of reasons. Let's start with the most obvious one – the intent behind it.

In a detailed August 2024 review, researchers at the Harvard Kennedy School analysed 125 Facebook Pages, each posting at least 50 AI-generated images, and found that many of these Pages were dedicated to spam or scams, with some being part of coordinated clusters operated by the same people.

The study highlighted how spam Pages used clickbait tactics to drive users to low-quality content farms, while scam Pages tried to sell non-existent products or harvest personal information.

Nothing screams 'harmless fun' quite like buying an imaginary product or handing over your personal details to a criminal, eh?

There can be a genuine threat behind these kinds of posts. And when it comes to social media companies, their algorithms are designed to keep you on their platform for as long as possible in order to maximise advertising revenue – a hallmark of the attention economy.

This means serving you more of the same type of content you've already interacted with.

Bear this fact in mind when I tell you that the Harvard Kennedy School Review found a high percentage of content appearing in users’ Feeds came from Pages they had not actually chosen to follow.

This is supported by recent data from Meta’s own Widely Viewed Content Report, which shows that in Q1 2025, 35.7% of Feed content views in the US came from ‘unconnected posts’ – up from just 8% in Q2 2021. These are recommendations of content from Pages, Groups, or people users are NOT connected to and have not actively chosen to follow.

In other words, over one-third of the content in your Facebook Feed comes from sources you never subscribed to or followed – it’s simply served up by the algorithm. This can create fertile ground for AI-generated misinformation and scams to reach a wide audience more easily, often without users realising the synthetic nature of what they are seeing.

Liked an AI post about cake?

Look forward to seeing many more of them...

The other problem

Beyond the immediate threats of scams and misinformation lies another problem – one that could have important repercussions for us as a society as we get used to living in this new world.

It's worth remembering that we're still at a stage of naivety when it comes to AI because it's such a recent development. While we've always understood the danger of believing falsehoods, there's now a danger of the opposite happening as well. That we stop knowing what or who to trust, and that we stop believing things that are true. This erodes the fabric of society, making us far more vulnerable to manipulation and cynicism – the kind that thrives in cult-like systems of control.

This leads me to something called The Liar's Dividend. It's worth understanding this concept because once you do, you'll realise just how prevalent it’s becoming in our modern world. It’s a tactic we now see regularly in politics and media, and it's probably best exemplified by the phrase 'fake news' – popularised by Donald Trump and now widely wielded as a political weapon to discredit legitimate journalism and factual reporting around the world.

The Liar's Dividend refers to the phenomenon where, in a world full of misinformation and manipulated content, individuals can simply dismiss inconvenient truths by claiming they are fake or fabricated.

All of this speaks to a broader societal shift. Quite simply, the more sophisticated our tools for creating convincing AI content become, the less trust we might start placing in anything at all. This potentially allows liars and perpetrators of bad acts to escape accountability by sowing doubt and confusion. And as you read this, you can probably recognise that this is a path we're already heading down.

It's also worth pausing to mention the "illusory truth effect"– the phenomenon where the more often you hear a statement, the more 'true' it sounds. So, repetition can make people believe things they shouldn't, regardless of their actual truth value. Now think about that in the context of social media algorithms serving you more of the same type of content you regularly interact with. You can quickly find yourself in a digital echo chamber of propaganda and unquestioning acceptance.

What does this mean for truth?

This is the deeper concern. Misinformation is just one part of the story. The greater risk is a loss of trust in everything – a point chillingly captured by political theorist Hannah Arendt in 1974: "If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer."

In the new age of AI-generated content, we're seeing some concerning parallels to Arendt's observations about how constant exposure to falsehoods risks undermining people's confidence in distinguishing truth from lies. As one recent analysis noted, this has significant implications for public trust.

In a social media-saturated world governed by algorithms designed to maximise revenue, we're increasingly at risk of manipulation. As a result, we're heading towards a time where truth becomes less an objective standard and more like beauty: in the eye of the beholder.

There seems little doubt that we will have to learn – and quickly – to become better at filtering and discerning the plausibility of online content. At present, we're still in the early stages of this technology, and we remain far too naive, too trusting, and too quick to believe things we shouldn’t. A 2022 study (conducted before the AI boom) by Ofcom found that a third of internet users were unaware that online content might be false or biased, and that we commonly overestimate our ability to spot misinformation.

Education forms one part of the solution. The authors of the Harvard research suggest teaching general digital literacy best practices, such as Mike Caufield’s “SIFT” method:

• Stop

• Identify the source

• Find better coverage

• Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context.

This approach, however, requires effort and a willingness to remain open-minded and to question and investigate posts before believing and sharing them. For those prone to confirmation bias (the tendency to favour information that confirms existing values or beliefs), this might be a big ask. Many of us are too entrenched, too reactive, and too uncomfortable with being wrong, just like the photo judge.

The other part of the solution lies in stronger regulation, not only of social media and their platforms, but also of the AI technologies that generate this content. Yet, meaningful regulatory frameworks for AI remain in their infancy, and we’ve seen very little progress when it comes to introducing controls and rules for social media companies.

So, as AI-generated slop continues to flood the internet and our social media feeds, our best defence seems to be a personal one. Remain sceptical, question what we see, and help others do the same. The need for critical thinking and proof-seeking has never been greater.

That’s right: in a world drowning in misinformation and AI slop, take a lesson from the bread-horse: never forget the importance of proof.

Alastair

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…and improve it like this:

All within the space of about fifteen seconds.

Specifically, I want to focus on the psychological impact that AI might have on how we think, feel, and value our own humanity.

We'll therefore set aside the looming issues of job losses, deepfakes, disinformation, and a crumbling sense of what's real – all warnings raised by Geoffrey Hinton, often dubbed the Godfather of AI, back in 2023.

We'll also look past the unsustainable energy demands of AI, and the fact that it's outpacing our ability to manage it, like a stag party in an air traffic control room. We'll save all that for another glorious day.

Today, I want to discuss a different kind of existential risk: that AI makes the world more vanilla. That we stop appreciating and respecting the hard work involved in human creativity, and lose our sense of value for the messy, beautiful imperfections that make human expression and life what they are.

The possible result of this? A 'super-optimised world' that's streamlined, polished, and strangely hollow. And, perhaps most concerningly, one where we don't trust what we're seeing, reading, or even feeling.

That's what I want to explore here. The purpose of this article isn't to deliver answers (if only), but to spark thought and debate. I'm not claiming to be right, I'm simply sharing how I feel.

Let me tell you a story

In March this year, my sister-in-law invited me to an evening painting class. I felt a little nervous, having not picked up a paintbrush since my GCSE art class thirty years earlier. I didn't want to end up producing something that looked like it was painted by a six-year-old. Inside my head, the same conversation kept playing out:

• Me: What do you think?

• Friend: That's nice. Did your daughter paint it?

• Me: 😳

Despite feeling a little apprehensive, I went along, and I really enjoyed it. By the end, I was quietly pleased with how my painting had turned out:

Being a perfectionist, there were a few elements I liked and some (many) I didn't. Then came a thought: how might my picture look if I asked ChatGPT to take it and 'improve it'? So, in the spirit of experimentation and self-sabotage, I decided to find out.

I uploaded my image to ChatGPT, gave it a simple prompt, and sat back to wait. After fifteen seconds of feeling like I'd just fed my self-esteem into a shredder, an image popped up on my screen:

It's good, isn't it? If you ignore the fact that there’s no door (surely a fire hazard?)

In less time than it takes to say, “Is that a shooting star or a malfunctioning SpaceX satellite?”, ChatGPT had created something far more advanced than I had produced in two hours. And it would take me many years of regular practice, hard work and dedication to match this skill level, as a human.

I think it's worth taking a moment to look at how we arrived at this point.

ChatGPT and the rise of AI

ChatGPT first came to prominence in late 2022, and the general reaction from users was one of astonishment. Since then, it – and a growing crowd of other AI tools – has rapidly embedded itself into everyday life.

These tools can assist with everything from coding and admin tasks to content creation, brainstorming, language translation, and more. I use ChatGPT myself: as a personal assistant, to brainstorm, to help improve my grammar, and to create alternative Mr Men characters…

Since its launch, ChatGPT has evolved rapidly, drawing on vast datasets and patterns in human language to improve its responses. It can now write essays, generate jokes, debug code, create photorealistic images, help plan your wedding (or your latest round of impulsive trade tariffs) and even mimic Shakespeare. Yes, Shakespeare’s back, and he’s writing product descriptions for air fryers.

For an increasing number of tasks, ChatGPT can perform at a level that feels highly competent, sometimes even exceptional. While this sounds impressive, I think there are some big questions hanging over it. Let's start with this one:

Are we going to slowly lose our appreciation for what it means to be human?

Trying to be perfect

I could argue we've been treading the path of perfection for a while now. Take photography as an example. A decade or two ago, we might have been manually Photoshopping our photos on a desktop computer. These days, we carry a computer in our pocket that can edit our photos in moments, at the touch of a button.

Since the Instagram era began, people have been doctoring the narrative of their lives on social media to suit how they want other people to see them. From adding filters and 'improving' photographs taken on our smartphones to selectively sharing the best moments and ignoring the rest, we’ve been airbrushing our reality for public display.

While there's nothing inherently wrong with this, it has taken us in a new direction. Yes, we’ve been editing images for decades, but AI makes the process instant, frictionless, and disturbingly convincing. It can add, remove and move elements, change backgrounds, alter facial expressions, and stitch together the 'ultimate' photograph of a moment that never actually happened.

"Remember that time we surfed on a blue whale?"

(Kid's been eating too many sweets!)

Writing is another area where we’ve leaned on technology for years. We've used computer software to help us improve our work, from grammar checkers to style editors. These days, it's common to rely on software like Grammarly or Hemingway to refine our writing and suggest clearer ways of expressing what we're trying to say. I use Grammarly myself.

When it comes to video, Google recently released Veo 3, marking a significant leap forward. In just two years, AI has progressed from generating rudimentary clips, like the viral "Will Smith eating spaghetti" video, to producing content that's nearly indistinguishable from real footage. Veo 3 can create high-definition videos complete with synchronised dialogue, sound effects, and music, all from simple text prompts.

One might argue that AI is simply taking creative assistance to a higher level, building on the assistance we're already using. And, there’s no doubt there can be genuine skill in using it effectively. The problem is, it’s equally possible to get it to do all of the work for you, like a magic button for creation. And that leaves us at risk of transforming human creativity into something less personal, less meaningful and far more lazy and manufactured.

The over-reliance on AI has contributed to what critics are calling "AI slop". Think of it as the spam of the 2020s, but slightly less meaty. Like gruel pretending to be crème brûlée. Crème Gruelée, perhaps? The term refers to the deluge of low-effort, AI-generated content that is now saturating the internet.

AI slop comes in many forms, from generic blog articles to spammy videos and misleading images. Rather than being created to inform or inspire, it’s instead produced to mislead and to game search engines and social media algorithms with the aim of generating eyeballs, clicks and ad revenue.

The result is a degradation of the internet into a landscape cluttered with material that lacks authenticity and depth, making it harder for genuine human creativity to stand out. Like a handwritten letter buried under a mountain of junk mail.

Beyond the volume of content, there are some real question marks over what this could mean for the craft and expression that sit at the heart of human creativity.

AI and creativity

As humans, we are the most creatively expressive species on the planet. Our brains are capable of composing breathtaking music, painting stunning works of art (present company excluded), and telling stories that move others to tears. But I fear AI could be a looming threat to this.

When it comes to creative work, AI can now write jokes that make you laugh, imitate famous authors, and generate content on almost any subject. It can compose music, produce visually stunning digital art, and mimic the styles of great artists. And it's constantly learning and improving, trained on the most brilliant pieces of creative output ever produced. Crucially, it's setting a high bar for humans to live up to.

So, what happens when we, as humans, spend hours creating something that just doesn't seem... as good? Not only to us, but to others. Suddenly, a piece of work that might once have seemed remarkable by human standards might feel merely... ordinary.

Imagine, for a moment, being surrounded by masterful artists and songwriters; by the most talented writers with the most expansive vocabularies and razor-sharp wit. Your own writing, your own art, might suddenly seem amateur by comparison.

As people with an innate need for validation and recognition, it might be very easy to think, What’s the point? What’s the point in putting in all those hours of work to become a master of your craft, if excellence no longer stands out and AI can just replicate it?

Of course, this isn’t just a personal or creative issue. Entire industries are restructuring around AI, and we’re starting to see the consequences for jobs and livelihoods.

Some people are seeing this storm coming and want to fight back against it. But this brings us to the next significant psychological problem we face with the growing use of AI.

Distrust

Lately, I’ve caught myself doing something I never used to do when looking at online and offline content. I've found myself pausing and instinctively wondering how much human involvement there was. Did a human create this? Did they really put effort into it, or did AI do most of the work? I don't think I'm alone in having that reaction.

We can often look for clues, and sometimes there are obvious ones. But AI is continually evolving, which means that the line between AI-created content and human-created content is becoming increasingly blurred. And this has the potential to push us towards distrust and uncertainty.

To me, this is a growing personal concern, but also a much broader societal one. If we lose the ability to know what to trust, the implications extend far beyond creativity. This is, I feel, a subject for another article, but it's worth mentioning here because trust underpins how society functions, and we're already seeing the consequences of social media disinformation, profit-driven algorithms, and media manipulation.

I've observed in myself that if I believe something was created entirely by AI, with little human effort and no disclosure, I feel uneasy. Subconsciously, it feels like a kind of deceit, as if someone is passing something synthetic off as real.

But here's the issue: I can't know for sure. Did AI create the whole thing for them, or did it just polish it? How much human effort went into what I'm seeing? Is this 10% human-created? 20%? 90%?

That brings us to an even harder question to answer: where exactly is the line? If AI “helps” me write better, is the outcome still mine? I'd argue it is, but there must be a line somewhere. If we leave that line to human judgment, it could get very blurry. Like handing a child a big box of doughnuts and telling them to be sensible. You know full well what’s going to happen.

If we can’t rely on creators or software to stick to an acceptable-use limit, it leaves the door open to interpretation, and the judgment falls to the audience instead. But, in the case of a digital image, how can the rest of us tell how much effort went in? How do we know whether someone spent hours writing prompts to create their piece of art or simply said, “create me a portrait of Mick Jagger made entirely of Wotsits”?

All of this leaves us with a problem. If we want to push back against the overuse of AI, how can we do that when we don't know for sure what is and isn’t AI-created, and to what extent?

Final thoughts

There's no denying that AI brings benefits, particularly in diagnostics and medical research, in helping to combat climate change, and in other uses that genuinely serve humanity and the planet. I'm under no illusion that these are significant. It's also useful as a tool to aid human creation, to do tasks that enable us to become better creators ourselves.

I feel somewhat conflicted because I find AI useful as an assistant in my work and thought process, and I see its benefits. But the danger comes when we overuse it. If AI-created content becomes too abundant and wrapped up in our lives, human content may no longer stand out, instead blending into a sea of machine-made sameness.

Right now, I worry that AI is being overused in areas where human input still matters most. It's becoming like Pandora's Box, and we're starting to see AI used in ways that risk undermining creativity, meaning, and our deeper human needs.

Maybe part of the answer lies in transparency. It might be idealistic, but if content generated by AI were labelled as such, we could make our own judgements. Right now, work created with minimal human input or effort is being presented as if fully human-made, implying significant effort and time went into it, when it likely didn't. I think we, as humans, want to know that we’re admiring human creativity as human creativity. Because without that, something essential is lost: authenticity.

What does this mean for the future? Well, if we don't give more thought to how we're using AI, and confront the wider dangers it poses, maybe the best place for it is in the bin, along with that picture.

Alastair

P.S: While writing this article, I've often questioned whether I'm being a hypocrite. I do, after all, use ChatGPT as a creative tool, and I've used it to support me in writing this article (and to help create some of the images used within it). But I don't think my article is anti-AI. I'd say it's anti-overuse, and pro-human. If AI is used as a tool to support human creativity, rather than replace it, then I think it can be a good thing. Like a musical instrument in the hands of a musician, it's always the person who gives it meaning.

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