TikTok Adds “Less AI, Please” Slider

No matter what Zuck may say, it seems a rather large portion of social media users would at least like the option to reduce the amount of AI generated content from their feeds. TikTok has now joined Pinterest and other social platforms in offering a way for users to signal that they’d like less slop, thanks.

TikTok is the latest social platform to add an option to limit the amount of AI-generated content that appears in your feed, with the platform rolling out a new slider in its “Manage Topics” tool that will enable users to indicate that they want less AI slop in stream.

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As explained by TikTok:

“Manage Topics already enables people to adjust how often they see content related to over 10 categories like Dance, Sports, and Food & Drinks. Like those controls, the [AI content] setting is intended to help people tailor the diverse range of content in their feed, rather than removing or replacing content in feeds entirely.”

So now, if you’re sick of seeing weird AI-generated videos with stilted acting, or body-morphing America’s Got Talent performers, you can tell TikTok that you don’t like it, and that should reduce its presence in your For You feed.

TikTok is also getting proactive in finding new ways to tag and track AI generated content, at least internally.

Which it’s also working on. TikTok is also testing “invisible watermarking” on gen AI videos, which will help determine when AI has been used in creating a clip.

“Over the coming weeks, we’ll start adding invisible watermarks to AI-generated content made with TikTok tools like AI Editor Pro, and content uploaded with C2PA Content Credentials. The watermarks will help us label content more reliably, and give us more context around changes made to content.”

TikTok says that it already requires users to label realistic AI-generated content, while it also uses C2PA Content Credentials to identify AI-generated content, and label it in-stream. But these measures don’t work when videos are cross-posted, and these additional markers are not included in the metadata of the clip.

TikTok’s hoping that broader adoption of invisible watermarking, along with C2PA, will enable better tagging of AI content, which will then improve its capacity to limit such when users opt out of seeing AI clips.

Which is an interesting shift.

Compare this to what Mark Zuckerburg said on a recent earnings call:

Zuckerberg described our future feeds during Facebook-parent company Meta’s third quarter earnings conference call on Wednesday, describing it as a natural evolution.

“I think were going to add a whole new category of content which is AI generated or AI summarized content, or existing content pulled together by AI in some way,” the Meta CEO said. “And I think that that’s gonna be very exciting for Facebook and Instagram and maybe Threads, or other kinds of feed experiences over time.”

As SMT points out, of course one might insist that users will find even more AI slop in their feeds “exciting” if they were, you know, investing hundreds of billions of dollars in producing such garbage.

Of course, if I were spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI development, I’d be pretty keen to paint a rosy picture of its potential as well, but thus far at least, users have not shown the same interest in artificial visuals and video, even as it becomes more and more realistic in its depictions.

Just becuase you build it, does not mean they will come, Mark. Users are speaking pretty loudly here, buddy. And other platforms are listening.