THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FUTURE

The third and final part in a series on Kate Crawford’s ‘Atlas of AI’

A humanoid robot performs boxing with a visitor at the Nanning International Convention and Exhibition Center in China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region on September 19. / Photo by Zhou Tinglu/Xinhua via Getty Images.

Kate Crawford is a pioneer in warning of the dangers of artificial intelligence as the world grapples with increasing inequality. In a recent essay, “Eating the Future: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop,” Crawford writes about AI-generated images, including an Iranian news agency “photo” of what was said to be a downed American F-35 jet, purportedly the result of a recent attack that had not happened. Crawford pointed out evidence of AI at work:

”The grass beneath the F-35 is eerily green and untouched. Things are slightly off. All these images are AI-generated, realistic at first glance, and shared widely on social media and beyond. This is the area of slopaganda.” That’s the term for what Crawford says has become a new weapon in a war of words between those who understand the complexity of AI and those who do not.