Low-quality generated material produced at volume because it is cheap: filler articles, fake reviews, spam books, AI-generated video churned out for advertising revenue. It degrades the usefulness of search, marketplaces and social platforms, and it is an externality nobody is obliged to clean up.
Technical view
Economic drivers are near-zero marginal production cost against platform incentives that reward volume. Effects include displacement of human-authored material in ranking, contamination of future training corpora leading to quality degradation across generations, and erosion of trust in unlabelled content. Countermeasures include provenance standards, ranking changes penalising low-effort content, and platform policies requiring disclosure, all currently outpaced by production volume.
Related
Part of AI Terminology Index, section: Society and Impact.