The Butt Ugly Weblog

To Scroll or Not To Scroll, AI?

While researching for something else I came across this presentation from a few years ago. Of course, it's a bit ironic to talk about this in a service that involves interruptions and scrolling, but… who cares. I don't.

I would like to link this idea to the fact that there is a lot of talk about how AI will create all content in the future. Mark Zuckerberg even fantasizes about how artificial intelligence will be everyone's friend in the future, and the content offered to you will be completely personalized.

However, people don't actually want ''content''. They want experiences, and content is what you get when you think about the most scalable version of the worst possible experience that maximises the engagement. By "scalable" I mean the potential for the highest turnover, and by "worst" I mean what can be produced at the lowest cost.

When AI starts to create content it does it because companies want to have more scalable content production. Computers are far more scalable than humans, so this is not a big leap in imagination. And it doesn't matter whether it's personalized for you or not, it's still content, that is, the most efficiently produced that will keep you engaged the most. (Center for Humane Technology has a lot to say on this.)

The thing is, it will create an ever-increasing gap between content and experience. Different social media companies and news organizations already have to resort to dark design patterns to keep people engaged in this shitty content of theirs, and in the future, when the number of people you can hire is no longer the limiting factor on the amount of content you can produce, you will need to produce even more to be visible in this grand storm of mediocre content that will sweep the internet.

I think the human capacity for content is limited, simply because we run out of time. We only have limited waking hours, and most of those hours are not available for content: we work, we travel, we exercise, we eat. Yes, you can feel content slipping its tentacles to your travel time, or exercise time or eating time – even toilet time. But it is because of these dark patterns of addiction that the social media companies have learned to abuse. We can scroll for hours, but feel terrible afterward. At some point we learn.

I think we're hitting a kind of a limit though. One thing that AI does well is that it provides you with interactivity. You can actually engage with a metal mind on topics that puzzle you. Yes, it's sycophantic, it hallucinates and it will make mistakes. But all that time spent on talking to ChatGPT or Claude or whatever might be away from passive consumption of tokens generated by massive bot farms.

One of the reasons why I have given up on Twitter and Facebook is the amount of algorithmic content that always tries to sell me stuff, or make me more engaged with the content. I much prefer the feeling on Threads and Mastodon, not because of the lack of algorithms, but because they both feel more human. I can actually connect and talk to humans. I can go out with people I met online and have a meaningful experience with them. The Threads algorithm isn't actively trying to make me angry and Mastodon's algorithm is so dumb it hardly deserves to be called an algorithm. My experience with both is vastly superior to anything else.

So call this a gut feeling, but… I feel like we don't have to really worry about AI-generated content taking more of our time. The gap between AI-generated content (aka "AI slop") and real experience feels like it's widening.

So yeah, sure, use AI to reduce clutter in your life or do research or even talk to an infinitely patient AI friend. All of that stuff is away from content consumption. You don't have to be a passive consumer. You can use modern tools to shape your own life.