Thanks to MediaMatters excellent reporting, we can give credit to Google where credit is due. They are enabling the most despicable and mentally poisoned among us to play out their most racist fantasies in HD, all at the cost of a small grove of trees per generation. This is what the internet was missing, an avenue to be able to create some of the most openly hateful and denigrating things you've ever seen by typing just a few lines of text. Making hate propaganda accessible for everyone, hooray! Best of all, due to Google's russian nesting doll of overlapping Terms of Service, I don't even know if it's against policy for it to be generated, it may very well be all good as far as they're concerned.

The Verge saw some of the writing on the wall a month ago when Veo 3 was announced. Being able to generate several second clips with believable audio opens up so many avenues for slop-tent. If you're already familiar with the process of refining prompts, being able to churn out several related ones to string together for a larger video is easy. Combined with their relatively lax guardrails (which even the best are trivial to get around for determined actors) and boom, you've got a disinformation/hate speech/slop trough triple threat.

Looking at today, you can type in whatever hate-filled strawman of a scenario you'd like into the prompt and Veo 3 can make it dance. It'll be plenty for the commonplace racist to nod and comment "Yes, this is what they are all like", and realistic enough for the average unaware user to accept it as a truth, even if only temporarily. It creates a blurred reality for the less AI-literate where maybe the racist stereotypes are true. That thought leads to others, like "maybe there's something to that white replacement they were yelling about". This sort of content primes someone to be receptive to these ideas, and the algorithm will happily gorge the end user on it. This content explosion shows the underhanded nature of tech companies (the ones that try to act like they're not destroying society at least). Google will sternly wag a finger with one hand, saying "Hate has no place" on their platforms (less so nowadays) and gladly accept money to generate the hate with the other. It's like accepting $1000 to start a house fire and solemnly donating $10 to the family's GoFundMe with a So sorry this happened :(.

These AI platforms as a whole love to act as though there's little they can do to stop this content, but that's simply not true. Keywords and fuzzing of keywords to reduce access for bad actors, extremely subtle marking of videos and images to be able to track them back to prompts for moderation, or even additional scrutiny using AI tools themselves of generated products before they're rendered available to the end user. All of these are well possible but don't generate revenue, so they aren't a priority for AI companies. The guardrails, while almost always not enough, still need to be in place. There needs to be as much friction as possible while generating this anti-social and anti-person filth, so as to render it appealing as a means of spreading hate to fewer and fewer people. However, with the billions- trillions of dollars flowing into the AI industry right now, it's easy enough for them to simply absorb any bad press and continue to flood their bottom line with investments and advertising. Even if it makes things worse, they're still making money, so it's not necessarily in their investor's best interests to do anything about it.

AI as an industry is a cancer being egged on for profit, demonstrating a serious, immediate harm to society. The spreading of racism pisses on an already tense situation. Misinformation confuses and devalues useful and critical real news. The internet as a whole, which society has restructured itself around, is being rendered less useable by the day because of the flood of this AI generated trash. Really the only significant threat to this tsunami of shit would be comprehensive legislation and prosecution, but given the current political climate, it feels extremely doubtful much of anything will be done. So, we must do what we can: reject it loudly, talk to friends and family, and report and block bad actors to cut them off from their precious engagement. It's a miserable time but there's always hope for a better tomorrow.