Shrimp Jesus is the Future of Social Media
"Mark Zuckerberg has been clear about his intentions: He believes that the future of 'social media' is a bunch of human beings scrolling through and arguing about AI-generated content on his many platforms. In many ways, that future is already here."
I've been thinking about those words a lot over the last few days after reading them in a great piece in 404 Media.
The tl;dr is that social platforms are being swamped by endless videos and pictures created with generative AI. This content is produced at such speed that the creators and accounts behind it can engagement-hack on a mass scale by reacting to trends and viral moments immediately with similar content.
The scale of the sludge is what the author refers to as a "brute force attack on algorithms that control reality."
It means that, for creators who give a shit about what they create and give blood, sweat and tears to produce output that's quality, meaningful or born out of passion, they are being drowned out by AI-generated content. It also means for anyone who uses the platforms to, you know, be social, or to keep up with news, or to indulge in some online culture, they are finding an online world that's distorted, generated, and just plain fucking weird. (Looking at you, Shrimp Jesus).
As the writer, Jason Koebler explains,
"On top of the quantity of AI slop, because AI-generated content can be easily tailored to whatever is performing on a platform at any given moment, there is a near total collapse of the information ecosystem and thus of "reality" online."
I recently wrote about Dead Internet Theory and how it becomes reality when the majority of content is produced — and then engaged with — by generative AI and bots. A few years ago, it kinda seemed like a manageable problem. Elon Musk's campaign slogan for buying (and then trying to avoid buying) Twitter was "It's time to beat the bots." But something has shifted of late, and now it looks like we're speed-running to get to bot overload as fast as possible.
One of the main drivers is that rather than push back against it, the biggest social platforms like Meta have decided to embrace the slop and use it to suck in more eyeballs to force adverts in front of. The company is going all in. It's creating tools to allow businesses to generate 10s or 100s of versions of adverts, and make them way too personalised. It is also experimenting with entire feeds of AI content and what that would look like. Why? My guess is content creators are giving up, and the company can't afford a single metric to tick downward. Yup, yet more "growth at all costs" bullshit. Protect your share price; destroy your platforms.
What I'm struggling to process is how/why we would engage with platforms like this? What are the benefits, the utility, the joy, of scrolling through feeds of accounts that pump out absolute gutter-level shit?
Have we become so zombified as consumers that this will be an acceptable way to spend what little time we have on this planet? It's a complete departure from the utility the platforms once had. Yes, we've been moving away from it for some time, as everything has become about advertising, views, and influencers (yuck). Yes, content creators were already flooding the platforms with garbage in pursuit of the few pennies some of the platforms paid out. But, at least it was created by humans, and, within that, it gave everyone a chance to create something that could find an audience and that could make a genuine impact.
That possibility is getting smaller by the day.
What makes me even angrier is when I remember just how many billions have been pumped into this industry, and this is the best we have to show for it? Mediocre products pumping out mediocre content that is ruining what was left of the now-mediocre Internet experience. Ungodly amounts of resources and energy literally burned so that some brainless creator can get thousands of views posting pictures of Jesus Christ fused with sea creatures such as crabs and shrimp.
The small crumb of hope is that this next evolution of content creation dismantles the current stronghold a few powerful individuals have over social networks.
Perhaps this is exactly what the Web needs: to become so swamped in trash that consumers decide they want something else. It doesn’t have to mean “going back” to print or offline at all. It just means we’re likely gearing up for a breakthrough that wipes away Google and Meta and the whole first gen of junk. Onward, creative destruction!
Thanks for the post. No one wants to see shrimp Jesus or other ridiculous AI-brainfuck-creations. Now that meta has been training their AI with stolen books and documents, it would be more than reasonable to throw Mr. Michael Knight wannabe (Zuckerberg) behind the bars for the rest of his life. Well, not likely to happen though...these billionaires get their crimes forgiven.