why social media is ignoring a.i. slop
Social media isn't for people anymore. It's for bots, AI, investors, and metrics.
One of the most interesting and relevant concepts I’ve learned in my career is that of a solved problem. It’s a problem for which a solution already exists and trying to make something different is either not going to work or is a huge waste of time. You could add enhancements and integrations to these tools and platforms if you wanted, but there’s virtually no room for something truly revolutionary.
The solution works, works well, and trying to optimize it further is just what’s known as gold plating in the industry. Users won’t notice the changes or care, and neither would anyone not directly working on the code. And even they may be sick and tired of making endless tweaks to something already done for all intents and purposes.
Social media is one such solved problem. If you wanted to make an alternative to a TikTok, or a Facebook, or an Instagram, or what have you, you have a very obvious, clear template to follow. You know what features need to be implemented, and most of them use off the shelf software packages and infrastructure to implement.
A real time chat system using something like RabbitMQ under the hood. Live video with a Mux or AWS Kinesis subscription and kit. File management systems on every cloud provider are already optimized for easy and reliable image and video uploads, replication, and playback. Everything you can think of for this already exists and just needs to be included and customized to your whims.
But social media companies can’t go to shareholders and say "hey, we pretty much got all the users we’re going to get without having to grow humanity as a whole then giving everyone broadband, they’re spending as much time on it as they reasonably could without us having to somehow add more hours in the day, so… let’s just enjoy having a good thing out there, reliably minting money every quarter?" No, they have to demonstrate endless, aggressive growth by any means necessary.
The first attempt to keep our eyes glued to screens was by force feeding us rage bait and encouraging us to fight and argue. The second was fine-tuning feed algorithms to make us more or less passive consumers of whatever content they decided could keep us tuned in longer. The third was the virtual reality Metaverse push which no one wanted, except the tech bros because they couldn’t understand why we wouldn’t be enthused about living in the plot of a cyberpunk dystopia.
And now, the fourth is an endless stream of AI slop which is eating social media alive given how easy and quick it is to generate and post. Around a fifth of new videos and up to a third of new music uploads are generated by AI, with people arguing over the origins and authenticity of the content at length, while social media companies claim we’ll be able to use AI to create custom content we want to see instead of waiting on actual humans to make something interesting.
We could have seen a lot more moderation efforts to purge social media of AI spam, slop, and bots, allowing only obvious parodies and jokes to stay up, but moderation is expensive and would cut into profits. It would also require prioritizing user experience and making real social interactions the main focus of these platforms, and neither are important to the tech industry anymore.
They’re looking at AI slop as yet another source of content, another thing they could use to get some more eyeballs staring at their apps for longer, seeing more ads, and clicking more links, and so they don’t care that users don’t like it. They’re still on the apps, they’re still engaging, they’re still getting ads served to them. So, why bother fighting the slop tsunami? It’s just more of that gold plating on functionality that has nowhere else to go.
Yet, the problem with too much gold on anything is that gold is heavy and the more gold you pile on top of an existing structure that was not build to handle it, the more likely it is to eventually buckle under the mass of all these extras. If the tech industry finally stopped fixing what’s not broken for the sake of "growth and disruption," we wouldn’t be having this discussion, much less many others. Unfortunately, it hasn’t, so here we are…