Living in the Slop Stream
The other day on Instagram I saw a bird doing something unlikely and charming. I loved it. I shared it. Then someone pointed out it was probably AI and suddenly I kinda didn’t care anymore, not just about that one video but about allllll animal videos. This is what Zuck and the other geniuses don’t get. By putting a few trillion into AI they are going to destabilize their own platforms, removing the authenticity and switching users off. People are going to just stop caring. And then they’ll go someplace else.
Not that it was trending all that well for Instagram. Last month in a sales pitch a rep from Meta said to me, “Instagram used to be about friends and family and then we were about community and now we’re about shopping.” Again, this was their sales pitch. They were literally saying that Meta had evolved from being about the most important thing in the world – the people I love and care about – to being an electronic mall, and they were bragging about it.
But still, an enormous number of people still believe those platforms are about friends and family, about authentic connection. They are still clinging by their fingernails to a platform that has fundamentally abandoned everything they care about. How long will they hold on? Well, what if Meta tossed a few bucketfuls of AI slop on them?
It’s going to be torrential. I was this many years old when I discovered “anger farms” are a thing. In October, Marc Andressen invested in Doublespeed which is, according to Futurism, “a startup operating a phone farm to flood social media with AI-generated slop on behalf of its clients”. You thought Facebook made your uncle’s politics crazy? This tidal wave of crap is going to make everyone crazy. Or, more likely, they’ll just change the channel.
Because other platforms will evolve. Facebook is 20 years old, TikTok is 8. At that rate, probably as soon as next year someone will be launching the TikTok-killer, something more authentic, more community based, more fun, at least for now. Marketers are going to struggle to find new ways to integrate with it and sales teams are going to be putting together animated GIF-laden decks selling ad packages for it.
Meanwhile, somewhere out there is a kid happily curled up on the couch with a big, fat book.