Feasting at the Trough of AI Slop

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox.

In a recent interview, Mark Zuckerberg said something remarkable: “Feeds [were] friend content and now it’s largely creators, and in the future a lot of it is going to be AI-generated.” [Emphasis added]

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 with machines. This is a remarkable idea offered up by the best positioned person in the world to have it. Curation and creation, all algorithmically controlled.

However, Zuckerberg got one thing wrong: It isn’t the future—it's already happening. A cottage industry of AI creators on social media is flooding the internet with their creations. My research indicates this phenomenon is already far larger than you think.

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 is already so low that human creators can’t compete. Whether you like it or not, AI products are vying for our attention.

In this column, we’ve discussed ad nauseum that attention is a competitive marketplace, meaning that AI content is only a threat if it is more attention-gaining than other assets, or if the producers of AI content have a structural cost advantage over traditional media companies.

This article is not a doom-and-gloom outlook on AI-created material. Crucially, AI-generated content is only performative online if it is more competitive—if its consumers derive superior utility from it. It only takes market share if people like it. While it is tempting to dismiss this content out of hand, those impressions are earned, not given. Attention aggregators like the social media platforms are not in the business of losing users, so they aren’t going to surface something that isn’t performative.

Why are we talking about this now? AI content—in particular, AI-generated images—are, as of last week, indistinguishable from real photos. Welcome to the season of AI slop.

Checking in on AI progress

Let’s put content—a horribly vague word, but the only one broad enough to encompass my argument—on a timeline of improvement. On the left-hand side is the cave art of 40,000-plus years ago. It is creation at its most primitive, with humans using simplistic tools to express themselves. Each subsequent technological improvement like the Gutenberg printing press decreased the costs of creation or gave individuals the power to make more sophisticated art. Progressing from the harpsichord to the digital piano allowed far more people to play the keys. Progressing from the Gutenberg printing press to Google Docs and Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing allowed far more people to publish books.

Source: Every Illustration.

AI-generated content is the latest iteration of that improvement curve. It allows people to transform a hastily scrawled prompt, and voilà—you can produce not just one object, but thousands. It is the next step in that improvement curve, allowing more people to create more content cheaper. This improvement curve is why AI generation startups like Runway describe themselves as a “new type of camera.” Not only can you make videos, you can make new kinds of films (for a lot less money), too.

The key to being a substitutable good, is, well, being able to substitute what came before it. For AI-generated content, that means it can look like the content produced by tools from previous generations.

As of last week, we have officially passed the point where it is possible to tell the difference between AI images and real life without close examination.

Become a paid subscriber to Every to unlock the rest of this piece and learn about: