I'm of the opinion that both are true for different reasons.

First there is a certain fatigue with social media, I would say that social media per se are falling out of fashion (due to many reasons beyond the scope of this post). The social media is mainly failing because of bad Algorithmic feeds, but algorithmic feeds aren't AI. There's many things that many people are trying out as an alternative to social media; some to the point of ressurecting the Personal Websites and Link-Rings (as their methods to not participate in the "big tech sh*tshow").

Second there's a strong dislike for AI among many people and many CEO presenting it/ expection godlike results from it.

What I personally believe that many people mistake the correlations of theese two things as causation. Yes, they both suck, yes both is happening at the same time, but one has not caused the other.

I think we could use that sort of curation on the fediverse. For me, even mastodon has too much slop. I even had to stop being involved in some lemmy communities because there was too much slop. I have a very low tolerance for this shit. I am at a point where I don't even want to read books written after 2025 due to the propensity for publishers to be putting slop into books. A bunch of comments on here seem to end up equivocating and saying oh but AI is cool for this or that other thing... I don't see a single area where my life has been improved by the slop. I feel more isolated from other people, I feel the quality of information dropping and the ability to find genuinely helpful information (which was my main use case for things like youtube and a lot of the internet at large) is being rapidly destroyed, I can't trust news articles that generate slop images, so it's become very hard to find reliable news about the world where that used to be easy... I just don't see the upside at all. We are nuking the environment at record speed in order to have an idiot liar machine spew largely indecipherable drivel into every context of our lives. I think my options for maintaining my own sanity are now down to pursuing a fully off-grid hermit life for real, or probably become so isolated and miserable that I eventually kill myself... And I used to really enjoy the internet. I am starting to actually and viscerally hate it... Even a lot of the fediverse. I don't see any upside. I think computers peaked as an extension of human abilities probably in the early 2000's and since the migration to Meta and Google platforms it has regressed into a mirror of that time you would get a cd in the mail for 2000 free hours on AOL and it had some custom browser where half the screen was ads with just content in the middle, not unlike the movie idiocracy. Half the internet I can't even see because of my ad blocker and the assistance that more and more of our lives be lived in our houses staring at screens, while the outside world is literally on fire, just seems to be an overpowering and dissonant note in the orchestra of our lives... Why anybody would want to live like this I can't imagine... And everybody wanting to live like this makes me feel like there is a huge gulf between myself and the rest of humanity that I am not sure I have the energy to try to cross anymore. I can't seem to find the ability to equivocate on this like others have and say, but AI makes this or that better... AI makes it easier for people to be lazy about certain things, which is also bad. I am anti-work and would love for people to live a life filled with enjoyment and leisure, but that's not what AI brings to the table. Anybody using it so they can be intellectually lazy is inherently destroying their own problem solving skills in whatever parts of their lives where they haven't already done so. We work harder now than we ever did before, with AI assisting us and there is no sign of that trend abating... All it's done by preying on intellectual laziness has been to remove even more of our leisure time and turn us into people incapable of solving problems for ourselves and embed us in a life of meaningless toil towards pointless goals that seem further and further from solving the problems of the world, many of which are being caused exclusively or at least exacerbated by AI. So personally I would prefer useful toil to the endless and meaningless life of toil created by our co-existence with AI slop.

I like humans. They're pretty neat. My friends and family are particularly awesome. The site I've used to interact with them (rhymes with Schmacebook) has largely pivoted to content from "people" I've never heard of (usually about the same few topics) and yes, AI slop. Even groups where people ask for help will inevitably have people saying "oh, I talked with the clanker about this because clearly you can't do that and here's what it said..."

I've resisted posting on Reddit, but honestly I feel like Lemmy is sorely missing social posts about people's day to day in factor of memes and stuff. It has its place, but I'm looking for a mix of things.

Both. Algorithm-fed content was bad enough, AI has made it worse.

I'm more tired of algorithms. For example, I like to scroll suggested videos on YouTube. I kept getting the same video suggestions and the same type of videos. Like I would get a ton of channels with Joe Rogan clips. You would have thought I was a mega fan but I rarely listen to Rogan. Anyway, when I got a new phone I was logged out of YouTube and my 'suggested video' feed instantly got much better. I have not logged into YouTube since.

I am also tired of AI though. AI feels like imposter syndrome and is being used by lazy people. For example, I made a website about something I knew nothing about but my website looked like I was ann expert. I used AI write my articles. All I had to do was make sure it sounded good and then post it. A lot of people were doing this now especially if they are trying to make money off affiliated marketing. Anytime you see something like "10 best [fill in the blank]", that was probably heavily influenced by AI and influenced from other trending articles.

Why not both?

lemmy/fedi seems to be exactly that. i don't do social media other than this..

well hacker news can be considered one and the endless ai slop there is indeed tiring though

Both, for sure.

I like it here because my home feed actually ends, there are no ads and no suggested content, and no influencers getting paid to make others feel bad.

But I would like obligatory AI markings on all type of content that's been generated on every kind of platform. Would make my youtube watchlist more comfortable to expand (even if it takes only 30 seconds to identify an AI video, it'll still ruin your algorithm for the foreseeable future with only AI bullshit unless you also go and remove it from your watch history).

I'm very happy not being on other social media in general, so I wouldn't go back to the big ones even if they scrubbed every scent of AI off the whole site - but do it for yourself if it's something you want to have!

I'm not even sure how you'd figure that out anyway. At this point, the "non AI" content by influencers is likely stuff they or their production team wrote using AI. Everything I accidentally end up seeing that was posted on the big social media platforms feels to me like regurgitated algorithmic AI influenced slop, regardless of whether a meat sack is the performance puppet or not.

I tend to block most of the internet cancer out there and only hang out in places where the internet doesn't suck that hard. Anything touched by Meta is obviously out of the question. So as far as what people generally call social media is concerned, I just avoid all of it. Nothing of value was lost when I abandoned that burning pile of trash. Lemmy is ok though. It's clearly a social media, but everything about it is just so different that it probably doesn't even count as a "social media" in this context.

What about AI then? It's complicated. AI in general is pretty cool, but I'm using that word in a very broad sense. Stuff like isolating human voices from a messy audio signal involves AI. When a camera focuses on a human face, it's using AI. When your postal service uses OCR to read the address off a letter, it's using AI. Oh wait, nowadays even your phone can do OCR. Anyway, none of that really counts in this context, now does it? That's not the AI people are angry about.

AI that generates text, audio, pictures and video definitely counts, but that's just a fraction of what AI really is. It's currently visible, popular, widely used and commonly discussed. That's the type you're really asking about, now isn't it? My answer: it's still complicated. The technology itself is just fine. The way it's used to ruin the internet isn't.

For example, LLMs love to use specific phrases and people love to use LLMs to generate text for anything and everything. What you get is AI slop text that has all the telltale signs of being generated by an LLM and proofread by nobody. The internet is filling up with low-effort trash like that, and I'm completely fed up with all of it. Still not fed up with AI as a whole though. Everything under the peak of that ice berg is still very cool.

I like things to be genuine.

For a totally other example, the cinema: I rather watch an old movie with cardboard props and PUR-landscapes yet having a good storyline, than some modern pixelperfect CGI enhanced decorum showing off a shallow storyline. With a good story line I can even handle bad acting when it adds to the fun.

I likes short stories on Youtube. Dust is one of those channels. Trying to find science-fiction shorts elsewhere easily presents you mushy AI stuff without any depth. Click on one of those AI shorts and that has to become your new obsession, or so the algorithm assumes. Youtube Music? Same thing. Sure I can admit that few of AI generated music is technically good. Until you noticed that even those lack some necessary variation. And then each AI-provider have a whole channel spewing out a daily playlist.