Feasting at the Trough of AI Slop

Existing media companies will either need to adopt AI so they aren’t undercut by AI-first companies, or derive their value from things AI can’t replicate: appointment viewing, live events, exclusive IP, or counter-positioning as exclusively “human-made.” This is part of the reason why sports rights continue to grow more expensive. Creators will sti... See more

That all of us are reveling in content slop is an uncomfortable truth. It may be intellectually easier to blame AI as the problem when the issue resides in people and platforms. My double-bind theory argues that attention aggregators have no choice but to allow content that pushes the bounds of social acceptability. Otherwise, engagement moves to a... See more

Across X, Facebook, and other social media platforms, AI content is generating tens of millions of impressions every week. A Europol study estimated that 90 percent of online content will be “synthetic”—a.k.a. AI-generated—by the end of 2026. These estimates strike me as accurate, if not a little conservative. The cost to generate text and images i... See more