The internet: a once wacky world of strange forums and obscure memes, a tool to harness the sum total of human knowledge at a moment's notice. At least, that is, before AI slop ruined everything. In order to power data hunger AI models, companies and individuals are deploying a growing army of AI "web crawlers," bots tasked with crawling all over the internet for text, pictures, and other data. Once set loose, these bots bog down web servers, destroy search engines, and flood rival crawlers with their insane AI-babble. They Now, once organic images are lined up next to generated […]