Noah Smith is on to something here about AI’s impact on social media:
AI itself will simply naturally drive humans off of social media, by generating infinite amounts of slop...
As X and other social media companies lose the battle against the bot swarms, human users may stop relying on those feeds for their window on the world. The psychopaths and attention-seekers might simply get drowned out in the automated cacophony.
That would be a weird end to the age of mass social media, but honestly it’s not the worst ending I could think of.
If you played the original Halo game on XBox you’ll remember the scene when, in the midst of battling the Covenant, both human and Covenant groups are overrun with a 3rd alien species called The Flood. What The Flood lacks in intelligence it makes up for in numbers. Now the Covenant are fighting The Flood and humans and the whole situation becomes more chaotic.
This feels like a good allegory for our current problems with social media. We are wrestling with how to handle social media for ourselves, our kids, our politics, etc. The relationship is often adversarial between the users and the purveyors of social media.
Now in the midst of that unresolved fight, AI generated content is swarming the playing field and changing the game. It has become extremely easy to generate low quality or misleading content - aka “AI slop”.
For me, the exemplar of the initial wave of AI Slop was the “kid makes amazing statue out of plastic bottles” post, which debuted in 2024. You might have seen you aunt resharing this on Facebook last year:
My first reaction is to think the flood of AI slop is a bad thing, and certainly there will be negative effects. One direct impact will be to drown out real human voices on social media platforms.
Upon reflection, I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing. Can we really say that social media platforms and the leading voices on them are serving us well? They didn’t exist ~15 years ago, so they aren’t fundamental to civilization.
I’m not sure if we’ll like what comes afterwards better but in the oncoming battle between social media influencers and the AI Flood I say - let them fight.
PS: To understand the AI scene using more numbers and fewer words, see my live dashboard: takeofftracker.com