Not so sure any more about the “curated” feed? AI slop—much worse than any manmade brainrot—inexorably insinuates itself into our scrolling lives.
Not so sure any more about the “curated” feed? AI slop—much worse than any manmade brainrot—inexorably insinuates itself into our scrolling lives. Degradation is everywhere, from Amazon to X. Monopolistic tech giants at liberty to degrade the user experience, stripping them of their cash and time, to benefit shareholders. A final sacking of the internet? Pay up or endure the misery. Author Cory Doctorow has a name for it: Enshittification.
Doctorow believes that those tech giants are at the Enshittification stage of their business life cycles. They start by providing a service that is cheap and useful. Advertising is minimal. Once they have our attention, addictive algorithms keep us hooked. More adverts test our patience. Higher commissions for businesses who rely on platforms to sell their products. They know we have nowhere else to go. There are no alternative platforms for them to compete with. Turns out the formerly cheap, investor-subsidised platforms always came with a hidden future cost.
Increased sponsored content appearing in Google search is evidence of Enshittification. You can’t search for a recipe without being sold a frying pan. Doctorow argues their business models have always relied on continuous value extraction--it only becomes noticeably rampant when they are “too big to care”. Internal reporting in 2019 suggested the Chief Technologist at Google ordered employees to worsen the search tool. Users are forced to scroll further and search multiple times to find the answers they need. Thus, more time to view sponsored content. Despite Google’s 90% domination of the global search market, there needs to be continuous growth to generate returns for investors. The easiest way for Google to do this is by increasing advert revenue which grew 10.5% in the past year.
AI chatbots like ChatGPT has made it easier than ever to Enshittify. They can generate more content at a fraction of the time and cost. Reddit forums advise how to create and profit from completely AI-generated YouTube channels. Websites publish ChatGPT-written articles. According to SEO firm Graphite, 50% of a random sample of 65,000 English-language articles, appears to be AI-generated. For companies, a new and seemingly endless supply of advertising space is born. For us, more time wasted searching for AI-free entertainment and human-written articles.
AI content doesn’t only bring inconvenience but misinformation too. People can generate fake photos and videos for potentially malicious agendas. Chatbots can fabricate convincing but false information. As the sheer volume of AI-generated content increases, our ability to distinguish the truth will decrease.
The internet is headed to its own demise. Facebook feeds, flooded with excessive AI-content and adverts, have led to (for the first time in the company’s history) a decline in monthly users. The internet is no longer for us: Cloudflare estimates one-third of internet traffic is from bots. Doctorow suggests the solution isn’t a personal boycott against social media platforms: “This isn’t an individual [problem] but a systemic one...to fight systemic problems you need to be part of a systemic solution.” Maybe then companies will realise they can no longer steal our data, make us pay as they enrich billionaire shareholders, sell us products we don’t need, and undermine truth itself. A mass exodus of these platforms can allow us to remake a more democratic internet.
It’s time to tell companies that we are worth more than their bottom line.