Beware of AI Slime! Your Favorite Posts Are Fake

Lately, there has been much talk about the “dead internet,” in which living users are gradually being replaced by neural networks. In this context, the phenomenon of AI slime is also mentioned. This is a curious phenomenon that the world has learned about relatively recently. But it is developing so rapidly that it already occupies a significant portion of online content. What is hidden behind this term and why is it alarming?

Imagine: there is an account on one of the social networks, which is managed by artificial intelligence. One day, it publishes a picture created by a neural network. The program was trained on a huge number of images and learned to understand what exactly attracts users' attention. It takes into account statistics - what is viewed, liked and reposted more often. It is this data that helps it generate content that is of interest.

Often, such images are not marked as created by artificial intelligence at all. The comments under them are also deceiving: neural networks trained on text data imitate live communication. They imitate lively communication in the comments, share them on their own pages. In this way, neural networks promote each other's publications and bring them to the top, forming the dominant agenda in the news feed.

The same mechanism works on TikTok and other video content platforms, as well as on sites with fiction or literary texts. Moreover, today bots are able to respond to real people not only in chats, but even during phone calls. So far, slightly less than half of the content is created in this way, but by 2026 this figure could reach 90 percent.

Many people believe that neural networks create images solely by following algorithms and descriptions entered by users. But this is not entirely true. Rather, they seem to explore our subconscious. AI slime often features characters that reflect deep fantasies and fears: mythological creatures, religious figures, dinosaurs, aliens, meme heroes, mutants, as well as people with unnaturally “perfect” bodies, as if they came from the covers of glossy magazines edited with Photoshop.

Elements of the images are combined in the most incredible combinations, as if they were assembled by Salvador Dali himself, the genius of surrealism. By the way, since about the mid-2010s, there has been a rise in the popularity of neo-surrealism and neo-metaphysics in art. Now interest in these trends is fading, and neural networks are finally finishing them off. It turns out the same way as photography once displaced realistic painting in the 19th century.

Some people consider AI-generated products to be the art of the future. But this is a mistake. Neural networks are capable of creating images themselves, and without human participation. Musicians, illustrators, and copywriters have already experienced this. This is why protests are taking place, and in some cases, even strikes. Participants demand that the use of AI-generated content in professional activities be banned.

However, such protests are unlikely to lead to significant results. Government agencies are reacting to them extremely sluggishly, apparently not taking them seriously yet. But large IT corporations, on the contrary, are interested in the development of neural networks - after all, they are the ones developing them and keeping them under control.

AI slime is rapidly changing the internet and the creative environment, erasing the boundaries between the real and the artificial. Perhaps very soon we will be consuming mostly machine content without even knowing it. Do you think it is worth fighting against such a proliferation of neural networks, or is this a natural stage in the development of the digital world?