As a disclaimer, I'm not actually anti-AI, but tons of slop is made with it. It's the same as those TTS Reddit reading videos from back in the day or any other shitty trend from the last 10 years.
I'm old enough to know to dismiss internet noise as vastly out of touch with the actual silent majority of internet users, so this moral panic over slop to me was just zoomers who grew up on reaction videos thinking that wasn't slop to the folks who came before, but I was on a train, looking around, I saw like 4/5 people I could see were on their phones, watching clearly AI-generated content, on TikTok or something similar based on the UI elements, one of them even had it on speaker for some reason.
All of them seemed around my age in the mid-20s.
Thing is, I don't really understand it, what's the appeal? I'm not asking about being on your phone, but specifically short-form videos about nothing specific.
When I looked it up, lots of talk about addiction and dopamine loops, but I can't relate to that, I assume this maybe has something to do with me having ADHD and the theory that my dopamine system doesn't really work "normally".
I tried watching TikTok before, but it definitely wasn't stimulating for me, I got bored pretty quick. If I was on a train and really bored looking out the window listening to music, I'd whip out a Wikipedia page or read the comments on Lemmy or look up a random question on my mind.
Why? Well in my experience - text is a lot easier to consume you can consume more information faster, hence to me - it's more stimulating. Works both ways too - It's just easier to express yourself quickly and clearly in text than by speaking. Even typing on my phone feels a helluva lot less taxing and more stimulating than speaking/listening.
It's not like I don't watch videos, I do have videos on in the background sometimes when I'm tidying up or whatever, where I prefer long-form stuff so it just fades into the background and stays consistent and non-distracting. If I watch a movie it's often something I kinda need to mentally work myself up for. I definitely wouldn't be able to pay attention to a video playing on my phone.
So my question is - what's so stimulating about this type of stuff in particular?
I want to hear about your experience so I can understand it better.
I'd like to understand it, because otherwise it feels like most people are weird aliens, driven by forces beyond my comprehension, and it's not nice :(
The diagnosed ones generally are, the others are generally self medicating in a variety of other ways, from caffeine to alcohol to nicotine to marijuana to illicit amphetamines.
That seems absurd, we'd never build a civilization if everyone was at this level of dysfunction or anywhere near a majority, nevermind one with such rigid specific rules.
From a quick glance - it seems more like ADHD prevalence is around 2-10% depending on how it's looked at, which is still very very high, but nowhere near.
Unless you have figures that demonstrate otherwise, I think it's more productive to assume that unless someone is specifically professionally diagnosed and taking medication they need to perform basic functions, you can't just assume they have the disorder, rather than them just having some traits that externally might resemble some traits commonly associated with the disorder.
Yeah, we would.
A) ADHD does not prevent most people from living a normal life
B) most of human society throughout history has not required the level of planning and attention that modern society does
C) ADHD does not matter if you're a slave or indentured servant who's going to get beat if they don't do their job
D) ADHD symptoms tend to lesson with exercise and hard physical labour
And recent surveys have as many as 25% of people suspecting they may have undiagnosed ADHD:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/10/241014210502.htm