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What is the AI Slope With AI Content Generators and How It Works?

With the rapid adoption of Artificial Intelligence in social media marketing, we are starting to witness a unique phenomenon known as the AI slope. But what is this phenomenon? In simple terms, it can be understood as the rapid surfacing of low quality, and visually unappealing, AI-generated content across social media and marketing channels, primarily on Facebook.

This content wave has been found in the form of disturbing images of children starving in war zones, to mistreated elderly individuals, all of which are fabricated and published online with the purpose of attracting attention of viewers. With the introduction of AI, platforms have started to allow and promote creative sharing, though the AI slope phenomenon features a darker side of social mead content in 2024, where easily available low value posts are curated for the purpose of driving financial gains.

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A Call for Help: The Experience With AI-Powered Content on Facebook

Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have been seen to be a home to those AI product and media posts and videos that are evoking strong emotional reactions, which are intended, to lead to increased engagement rates through likes, comments and shares. With the intent of click baiting users, these posts are deliberately crafted with these shocking images in order to draw attention uniquely with the hope of leveraging these tendencies of the humans to engage with content that is emotionally driven. In some cases, creators deliberately choose sensitive subjects, exploiting humanitarian themes to increase engagement and, in turn, generate revenue.

1. Images of Starving Children and Mistreated Elderly: These disturbing and un-authentic AI content, is circulated with the aim of provoking responses, by getting past the set standards in order to solely focus on boosting engagement metrics.

2. Goal: Attracting attention becomes the core goal in this case, due to the fact that the creators rely on the use of shock value and clickbaits rather than genuine storytelling.

3. Monetary Incentive: Most AI content creators approach this process as a revenue generating business, generating viral content to achieve significant growth with each highly engaged image or video.

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Facebook’s Easy Content Remuneration System and Different Design Pitfalls

Facebook has its own engagement based remuneration model that was initially established in order to incentivize those high-quality content creators. This model enables these users to earn money based on the total interactions on their posts. Thus, engagement driven models, such as Facebook's, not only attracts talented creators but also low-quality content creators who exploit its flaws to save time.

1. Engagement-Driven Earnings: The social media's remuneration system rewards those posts that generate likes, comments, and shares. Now, while this structure, is aimed at quality engagement, it is seen as inadvertently incentivizes low-effort, high-volume content.

2. Creator Demographics: A majority of, low-quality creators hail from emerging regions like Vietnam, India, and the Philippines, where $100 per 1,000 likes represents a significant earning potential and is an attractive opportunity due to currency parity. For these creators, a day’s worth of viral videos can yield substantial income, creating a lucrative motivation to churn out content in large volumes, using tools such as AI.

3. Algorithm Loopholes: Exploiting algorithmic flaws, creators maximize their content's reach, sidestepping Facebook’s content quality standards and driving high levels of engagement without necessarily providing value to the social network in any way.

Image showing the issues with Facebooks Remuneration System

Finding The Issues with Creator Remuneration on Social Media

The nature of this engagement-based remuneration model, is being seen to give rise to a number of challenges on the digital and social ecosystem, with content creators being driven by monetary gains while loosing focus on the actually quality. This may work in the short term, though in the long term can affect the consumer's experience negatively. Here are a few reasons why:

1. Currency Parity: In regions and emerging markets that have a lower cost of living, earning $100 per day through social channels is almost equivalent to some individuals monthly salaries. This disparity often encourages creators to maintain high engagement, prioritizing volume over quality.

2. Disinterest if Earnings Drop: Studies have shown that, these creators are driven by profit, meaning a reduction in this offered remuneration could lead to mass disengagement and content created from the social network, potentially affecting unique engagement metrics and the overall quality of available content.

Need for Change: A Struggle Against Mass Production with AI Tools for Creating Content

For content moderation teams, the availability of poor-quality, AI-generated content has become a serious obstacle. The enormous volumes of produced content created every day requires social media platforms to monitor and filter it, yet thorough moderation is becoming more and more challenging due to the increased volume.

1. Moderation Limitations: A flood of mass-produced content makes effective moderating difficult, especially now that AI breakthroughs have made it easier to create infinite articles at a quick rate.

Facebook’s Dilemma: The Idea of Choosing Moderation vs. Engagement

Meta's seo and business strategy relies heavily on maintaining high levels of engagement. Content that goes viral, regardless of quality, increases this interaction, providing Facebook a reason to let high-engagement pieces run their course. However, Meta is caught in a tough spot: while these posts increase engagement, they also diminish the platform's quality and harm user confidence.


The Future of Social Networks and the Rise of Limited-Quality AI Content

As social media channels are growing at a rapid rate, this constant battle with AI created content are raising new questions when it comes to the future of AI content. Bots as well as artificially generated avatars and clones aren't just limited to Facebook, but socials such as LinkedIn are also seen to be exposed to AI-driven comments as creators adopt these trends. This growing presence of AI is creating alarming concerns within the ecosystems, where AI is not only generating content, but also moderating and interacting with it, leaving human creations and interactions as a by-product rather than a core purpose.

1. Bots and Fake Content Floods: Bots and AI creators are constantly a growing presence on social platforms, which are now contributing to a rise in trend of inauthentic content and interactions.

2. The Role of AI in Moderation: The potential for AI to moderate its own content is a new and rising worry. With more and more humans interacting with AI-generated content, it raises concerns about the authenticity of online engagement.

3. User Experience Risks: Social channels that continue to allow these low-quality, AI content generators are starting to see a noticeable long-term decline in user engagement. Without the right regulations in place, the AI Slope phenomenon can potentially result in social media networks that are more bot-centric than human-driven, potentially eroding the social foundation of these platforms.