Feasting at the Trough of AI Slop

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

Consider what he is saying. Not only will Meta’s curation on feeds like Instagram and Facebook be entirely algorithmic, but the content will largely be produced by algorithms, too. No longer will there be middlemen—your aunt, a friend from high school, or a Taylor Swift fan account—that you are responding to. Instead, you’ll be interacting directly... 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