AI Sludge Is Coming to a Feed Near You
When Mark Zuckerberg spoke recently about incorporating AI-generated content into his platform’s feeds — we’re talking generated profiles producing generated photos and videos — I thought the idea seemed stupid. Like many of the business decisions he makes that don’t involve buying other companies, I figured this one had misread the room.
I mean, who would want feeds filled with Shrimp Jesus?
I've had a change of heart. Not in my belief that this form of content is a waste of energy, a waste of resources, and a waste of retail space on feeds that could be used to share and promote creative output from human beings (if we'd just dial back the algorithms and let users explore and find content that interests them). Not in my belief that the reasons tech overlords like Zuckerberg want to pump our feeds full of AI content are nefarious; disguised as friendships and connections, AI content will be another way to bleed you dry of more data points and another metric the company can juice for its quarterly reporting.
Those still stand. The rise of AI content will be net-negative for platforms, creators, and society.
However, this week provided some evidence that a large percentage disagree with that or simply don't care. Many people are ready to happily embrace a future where "social" platforms ditch utility and become solely entertainment platforms.
The next sentence may sound crazy, but it all begins with a fully AI-generated video narrative series about an incompetent Stormtrooper named Greg.
Yes, it's janky. It has all the weirdness and uncanny valley that we associate with AI content. The sound doesn't always match up, and some of the ragdoll effects are rough as hell. But, it was also quite funny — and highly engaging.
The reaction to the videos shows I'm not the only one who got caught up watching them. The Instagram account, which first posted four days ago, has over 268,000 followers. On TikTok, the same account has over 4.6 million likes. It's going so well that the creator has already launched a product on Gumroad to teach others how to do the same. Lol, creators really have no shame.
There are a few factors as to why it's been successful. It's a recognizable character (more on that in a moment), the choice of a vlog-style video is smart as it goes a long way to masking the issues of generative AI in its current state, and in fairness to the creator, it's both funny and well thought out.
What I'm saying is it's not pure braindead content. I'd probably watch more. Many people are watching more of it.
But to what end?
It’s all so shallow. Videos created by prompts with moderate human oversight, just enough for the creator to feel creative, but not enough to require any real skill, craft or mastery.
At Trend Mill, we like to extrapolate the worst-case scenarios, so imagine this. The future of online platforms has become almost entirely AI-generated. Where does it go from there? Of course, it becomes hyper-personalized and targeted to each user to maximize those ad dollars. Then, we reach the point where platforms sidestep creators altogether and generate content directly in-feed, prompted by users asking it to "show me X, doing Y, looking like Z." Sure, it's a technological achievement, but what is the point?
Well, we know the answer to that, at least for social platforms. It is designed to drive engagement. A content mill that runs at a scale never seen before, able to produce output that's instantly tweaked to every trend, every hot take, every viral format, rinsed and repeated, working ever faster to meet our ever-shortened attention spans, producing here today gone in 3-minutes content, ready to move onto the next fad without a moments thought. A machine that platforms can use to drive revenue while cutting spending, no longer having to worry about how to compensate human beings for their creative endeavors, instead able to get ten, or thousand or a million times the output for a fraction of the cost. A tool that platforms can use to further our addiction to them, to supply us with tailored dopamine hits that are so frighteningly personalized they captivate our brains like never before.
It’s not even just platforms that are on standby to manipulate generative AI — creators grifters are at the ready too.
I stumbled across this post written by a guy who boasts that his workflow is "generating $50K/month in "brainrot" videos while I sleep." His process? He literally scrapes the top Reddit posts and has them generated into videos with "a Minecraft relaxing background." I'm not kidding. So, that's the future of content on social platforms? Generated without thought, pumped out across every platform, designed (presumably) to target children and teens, all to get some grifters ad bucks while they sleep.
As I said at the beginning of this post, I had firm beliefs that there would be strong pushback to entirely AI-generated feeds of content. I figured the majority of users would realize we were taken for fools, that the board execs are laughing to themselves as they write on the whiteboard, "Users are brainless monkeys who will watch what we tell them to watch."
But this week has shown that maybe that's exactly what we are.
AI sludge is coming to a feed near you. I'm not sure we've thought about the consequences of delegating content (and yes, I include writing, art, music and more in that) to generative AI platforms, who, let's not forget, stole the very content they are now spitting back out at us. And on that note is the ray of hope. I'm no fan of Big Corporate — see like all other Trend Mill posts — but these companies are sensing that AI is coming for their bottom line, and they are starting to push back.
This week, Disney and Universal have sued Midjourney for copyright infringement, dropping this absolute banger in the filing —
"Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism. Piracy is piracy."
Here's to that. Anyway, I'm off to see if those Stormtroopers made it off the planet they crash-landed on.
(Help me, I’m falling to the dark side).
Greg the stormtrooper is going to say hello to Disneys lawyers.
Its been done before as well, remember those old Troops videos in the early days of the Internet? those guys had talent, made the effort and they were made out of the love for the product and the creative process, not just to make money.
As I’ve been saying for years, the Internet is bisecting into two distinct groups: one group doesn’t care one bit about the quality of information, its authenticity, and craftsmanship; the other group cares very much about these things.
The first group are the people who think there’s no difference between fine art and mass-produced replicas of painting bought at Walmart. It doesn’t bother them that Jerry Springer and professional wrestling were staged. They probably care about what’s popular and convenient instead of what’s valuable, profound, and thoughtful. They don’t care if they believe false things or if their political views are based on fictional appraisals of the world. They think AI is art and have no problem with using or consuming it. They’ll be mostly found on the places like Facebook in the future.
The second group are the rare treats of the world. They care very much for fine art and insist that there is a difference between something fine and something mass-produced, that human labor, creativity, craftsmanship, and spirit matters greatly. They expect sports to be fair contests, not decided in advance for ratings. Naturally curious, they‘d rather hunt to discover something intriguing than go with whatever is popular and convenient. They’re not afraid to dig through old vinyls at music stores and hunt for obscure bands. They care about things like logical consistency, reality testing, and high-quality sources. Needless to say, they very much do care about AI, think it’s morally abhorrent, think it should be labeled, and think it’s inauthentic, or, at the very least, that it’s clearly not the same as human craftsmanship. They’ll mostly be found here on Substack in the future.
Increasingly, different platforms are going to cater to these groups differently, further solidifying the divide. Each group doesn’t necessarily do or consume all of these things, but the moral values underpinning their views on these things will definitely further drive this divide.