A Whimsical Internet

The internet is dead right? I mean, yes, it is. You can see how ai authored content is growing on every platform really. Reddit posts authored by purchased accounts are abundant, each one plausibly an ad for something somewhere. LinkedIn was always slop to me, but it’s gonna keep getting sloppier. Video and Image sites already had filters, ai content isn’t even much of a step away. Even something like Substack which has added Pangram detection is still showing that ai content can pull audiences. Steam, my beloved, is getting swamped with ai authored games - its not gonna slowdown, that’s for sure.

kill it with fire

It’s hard not to see the funny side of it. You have all these businesses creating platforms for monetizing attention on user created content, and it turns out that you can definitely optimize well beyond human user created content. All the problems of discovery and engagement and retention can be brute forced with volume and observing some kind of success metric. Why create a single thing when you can create 10 or 100 at the same time and find your niche. Yes, this is a helluva problem for the platform’s discovery strategy, but that’s not the creator’s problem, they signed up to create, not to solve discovery, that’s kinda the point of the platform anyway.

But I think that value proposition is broken now. Why does anyone need a platform to publish? Sure there are tools, but those a platform compliant tools shaped to squeeze your intent into a mold that fits the platform’s capabilities. You might say discovery, but not when everything is swamped with submissions. I think community is still relevant, shared signals and interactions, a common place to gather - but again platforms shape this, instrument it, monetize it, moderate it.

burn it all down

Let’s say you want to write something, but not just write, you want to include interactivity, so for example you want to discuss a concept like power growth in game design and you want the user to be able to muck around with different levels of power in a toy example. What platform do you publish this article in? You could write it on substack, link it from reddit and linkedin, make a video about it on youtube, make the demo on itch, link that too. I mean these services all exist and they do things. But I don’t know, it just seems a bit unnecessary now.

I want to be clear here, I’m not advocating against ai usage at all, I’m not saying ai can only create slop. I’m saying that with ai, many people can just make things for sheer whimsy now and existing platforms can’t handle that whimsy and probably never will.

In fact I would go further and say that ai enables audiences to create things for sheer whimsy, and that is a novel interaction for creators to consider now.

P.S. you can modify the game above by suggesting changes here: