STRIVING FOR MEANINGFUL CONTENT IN THE AGE OF AI SLOP

The title of this post also serves as my mission statement for this blog. It came together in my head almost randomly, without overthinking it. Two somewhat recent events served as catalysts.

The first event was reading this BBC article looking at the growing trend of people reducing the amount of content they post on social media. I was drawn to it because I have wondered over the last two years whether some of my Facebook friends have gone dormant. It doesn’t take much to notice that Facebook’s primary feed algorithm and notifications try to steer you toward friend content that has the most engagement from other users, even if you already saw it days ago. Even when I go into my friends-specific feed, I have to wonder if I am really seeing all of my friend’s current activity or if the algorithm is still just dangling content in front of me from my friends whose content I have engaged with the most in the past.

A cursory exploration of random friends’ profiles seems to confirm that a number of them have scaled back their posting- on Facebook at least. I never ventured beyond Facebook to Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, or TikTok. I had a Twitter account once for a fansite that I did some work for 15 years ago, but that’s probably been shut down due to inactivity. I’m on LinkedIn, but I’ve always considered it to be something like Facebook for professionals, and I never leveraged it for professional networking. All that said, I realize that my social media sample size is limited, but it’s still a sample size that seems to confirm the article’s observation.

There are plenty of justifiable reasons for folks to scale back their content on social media. For some, it may signify a lack of time because we’re all a little older now with families of various sizes. For others, it may indicate prioritizing privacy. There has been no shortage of lessons learned about the pitfalls of oversharing online! For others still, social media may have just been a passing trend that they have grown out of or away from.

As I approach middle age, I find that I want to be more relational with people. Children put a damper on that, because they understandably monopolize your free time, but I appreciate how social media allows me to stay up to date with some of the people who I have made a connection with somewhere during the course of my life. What I really enjoy is good conversation, but I will gladly settle for a one-sided conversation in the form of content that friends and family generate to share with the folks that they have made connections with in life. I appreciate being counted among those people. Comments sometimes serve as a barely adequate form of interaction, even if most of the time it is little more than feedback.

Herein lies the rub- if people stop posting content, then that relational connection withers. That doesn’t mean Facebook or any other social media site will reduce the flow of content its algorithms throw at you. Advertisements are one way to fill the void (and my how they do). Attention-hungry wannabe influencers and their inane and uninteresting clickbait are another. Since I ignore or block most of the advertisements Facebook throws at me, and since I don’t follow people who just want to be famous online, a lot of what I see between friends’ content (and skip over) are videos or “artwork” slapped together by foreign content creators or generative AI.

This brings me to my second event. I have the luxury of being able to listen to music during my workday. This often means Spotify at low volume through wired earbuds. I have tinnitus, so having a soft something to listen to helps take the edge off of the infernal and perpetual ringing in my ears. I can listen to news and science podcasts if the task before me is repetitive and familiar. When I need to focus on a special project or writing emails, I switch over to music.

Just last week, I queued up a Spotify-curated playlist of light piano jazz for some unintrusive background music. It got the job done, but I stopped when one piece sounded a little more interesting than the rest. Hoping that this unknown-to-me jazz artist might have a few albums of interesting material to explore, I went to the artist’s profile page. Instead of albums, there were just four or five singles spread over the last three to four years. My disappointment turned to curiosity when I also found that this artist had no profile picture or biography, two very standard things for artists whose music streams on a platform like Spotify.

When I got home that evening, I dug a little deeper. Returning to the same playlist I listened to at work, I went to each artist’s profile page. To my horror, I discovered the same thing each time.  The entire playlist was comprised of recent “artists” with just a few songs and no albums or biographies. I heard about the AI “band” The Velvet Sundown over the summer and I feared that this playlist was much of the same. The truth, as I found out, may not be as simple but could be equally disappointing.

Once the children were in bed, I went further down the rabbit hole. Through a series of internet searches, I found several articles detailing an off-putting practice of the streaming giant. Over time, Spotify has reduced the number of humans on staff who assemble their curated playlists. For certain generic searches, such as my query for light piano jazz, Spotify no longer assembles playlists of songs by genuine recording artists but has turned to commissioning generic pieces from studios that produce stock music. Because these are commissioned pieces, Spotify owns them, thus eliminating the need for royalty payments. This is most easily done with instrumental and soundscape tracks, which apparently a lot of people like to use as background music like I do.

Some of these studios use studio musicians to create these commissioned pieces, though the musicians receive no credit for their work. Other pieces, electronic soundscapes especially, are easily created through generative AI tools. Even simpler instrumental pieces like piano jazz can be created using AI. Spotify is banking (pun intended) on listeners choosing their ‘created by Spotify’ playlists over user created playlists for such background music requests.

So, these are cynical times, right? If social media fatigue has worn down our interest in creating or sharing meaningful content, there’s plenty of influencer and AI-generated slop out there to make up for it. Even on platforms where users seek certain content, corporate decisions are actually installing barriers to discovery in stark opposition to the initial purpose of the site or app. Maybe this is a sign that these companies have no qualms about commoditizing the services they were once passionate and idealistic about sharing with the masses.

Numerous articles are out there proclaiming that AI is slowly killing the internet. Even Google uses AI now to provide you with an overview of what it thinks the answer to your search may be, indirectly discouraging you from clicking through the search results to learn information for yourself. It sure seems like a downward spiral. Even if you want to create content, the currents you must swim against are stronger than ever before. Even early adopters aren’t safe from being overtaken by AI as the technology rapidly improves.

This blog isn’t an attempt for me to get famous. Heck, blogs are probably the least likely vehicle to achieve fame with in this era of YouTubers and podcasts. Maybe one day I will try to get one of my stories published, but this blog exists strictly because I like sharing ideas. Blogging is almost countercultural in a way. It requires the largest investment from those viewing your content. Unless you have a screen reader, you had to read this post on your own. You couldn’t digest it in 15 seconds or by leaving it on in the background. You have to commit to reading as far as you have the interest and patience for (and if you have read this far, thank you and the end of this post is coming soon). That’s a kind of relational investment.

In these days of partisan divide, cultural fracture, and carefully curated media echo chambers, honest and relational investment is something that we need more of. Sure, for now this blog will just be movie and book reviews, but I do plan on sharing other thoughts and ideas. Maybe you’ll read them, maybe you won’t. I’ve got a passion for sharing right now, and that sure beats giving up and letting all the phony garbage assume full control of our social media feeds.

‘Striving for meaningful content in the age of AI slop’ implies that I won’t always create something meaningful. No one can hit that mark all the time for everyone. That’s just life. But it’s better than settling for the smoke-and-mirror tricks that create something passable enough until you notice the peculiarities of the fine details (like feet for hands, or stale and generic lyrics over otherwise pleasant chord progressions). AI and clickbait content, at best, is only good enough, and it’s often redundant or built off of the talents of other people that some tech company fed it to teach it how to fake us out.

Most of all, this mission statement means that I care. I care about the content that I create, because I value the time that I sacrifice creating it. I care about you as well, because I’m asking you, a fellow human being, to sacrifice a fraction of your day to interact with my thoughts and ideas. If we can both value the time spent interacting in this way, then maybe we can value face-to-face interaction more as well. As an added bonus, if enough people produce meaningful original content, then it will make it that much easier for us to recognize the emptiness of all the filler out there and that, perhaps, it’s time to stop zombie scrolling.

Now that’s a nice ideal to try to live into.