Odd Lots - AI Is Upending the Lives of People Who Do Social Media Professionally

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

Social media is really strange these days: Increasingly, our feeds are starting to look uncanny, as AI slop proliferates all over the Internet. And for the professionals who are tasked with making content, whether it is social media managers or creators, it has been a head-spinning time of change. In this conversation, recorded at the Vermont in Hollywood, we get a primer on social media's AI era with two veteran Internet commentators, Rachel Karten (social media consultant and the author of the Link in Bio newsletter) and Taylor Lorenz (founder of User Mag). We discuss why people are afraid to admit that they love some genres of slop, why the AI discourse is evolving so rapidly, and whether our time online is moving away from scrolling feeds to engaging with chatbots. Read more:US Rebukes Australia for Plan to Target Social Media AlgorithmsMeta’s New Muse AI App Tops Charts, Draws Strong Reviews Only http://Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at  bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

AI is entering its most consequential phase where scale, safety and sovereignty will determine who leads and who lags. Join Bloomberg Tech in London on November 2nd and 3rd as global leaders across business, finance and policy examined the defining trade-offs shaping the future of AI. Thank you to our presenting sponsor, Salesforce and supporting sponsors, IDA Island and Schneider Electric. Learn more at Bloomberg Live.com slash tech London. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts Radio News. And welcome to another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast.

I'm Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. So we're here in Hollywood, our first ever live Oddlot show in L.A. And when we come to L.A., I feel like we have to talk about the influencer economy, right? The influencer economy, the creator economy, people who have 8 million followers on Instagram that none of us have ever heard of. There's so much I don't know about this world. There's so much I need to learn. And of course, we need to learn how, like, AI is upending all of it.

That's right. So this is the existential question facing creators. What happens to them when creating content essentially becomes, like, free or extremely low cost? So we have two very special guests for you. We are going to be speaking with Taylor Lorenz. She is, of course, the founder of user mag. As well as Rachel Carton, she is a social media consultant and author of the substack, Link in Bio. since we're here in LA and as we've alluded to in the past we've got to learn about influencers

and people with 5 million followers on Instagram and how they're how they're dealing with this moment yeah so we do in fact have the perfect guess that's right um thrilled to welcome to the stage the one and only taylor Lorenz founder of user meg as well as rachel carton social media consultant author of the great substatic link in bio Hello. Thank you both so much for doing this. Thanks for having us. What are you start?

What do you, maybe either one of you, what are you covering these days? How would you describe your coverage here? Sure. I write a newsletter called Linkin Bio. Oh, yay. It's about. It's really good. Everyone should subscribe.

Thank you. It's about working in social media. It's the primary trade publication for social media teams. And I interview experts. So I have interviewed everyone from the social team who covered Artemis to Chanty Beluga. I forgot about that one. Is that already, is that still, that was like a one week thing. And I am a tech journalist.

I write usermag.com. That's my substack. I write about, I kind of do a lot of roundups about online culture, write about tech, a lot of tech policy stuff too. a little bit of everything. So everybody's subscribe to that one as well. Absolutely. What are the vibes like right now in social media? A loaded question. Terrible.

All right. Go on. Backstage, Taylor showed me a video that she was impressed by. No, shut up. You guys. She was really impressed by it. Literally, we were backstage, and I haven't been on Twitter that much today. I saw one frame of this video that was the most AI generated.

And I was like, do you guys see a Coca-Cola truck exploded? It was of a Coca-Cola truck that was exploding coke out and somebody had a bucket. And she was like, did you see this? I said, Taylor, please. And then the next scene is there's actually a Mentos truck next door and the guy falls in and like explodes through the sky. And I was like, oh, my God, I'm becoming. And the caption was like the AI videos that your mom sends you.

Oh, man. And I showed Rachel. Younger people might not remember the fact that, for like many years, the only content on the internet was Mentos and Coca-Cola. That's like all we looked at for like a few years. That's like really strange. No, but here's an important question.

So the people that you cover, let's start with you, Rachel, the people that you talk to who are social media professionals, do they feel as if like AI is, we're going to, like, how is it about, like, are they mostly of the frame, like, oh, AI can do what I do? or do they mostly see it as an augmenter, oh, I can do much more of the job that I know how to do for years with these new tools?

So I think the way that AI is showing up for a lot of marketing teams is through their boss. I wrote an article about this called, does your boss have AI brain? And I talked to like 100 marketers who are dealing with an issue where their boss is asking them to use AI, and their boss is using AI themselves

and they're outsourcing all of their gut instincts to AI. And so I heard stories of a social manager who worked hard on a funny meme and they'll send it to their boss and they run it through Claude and ask, is this funny? That's so grim. That's so grim. I heard another example of a marketer

who their boss only buys into ideas that came from co-pilot and so they actually will mock up their ideas into the co-pilot UI to send their boss to get it approved. And so the quote that sticks with me from that article is demoralizing as hell. And so that's the way that a lot of marketers are interacting with AI, is their boss sort of forcing it upon them. And my takeaway from that wasn't like ban AI from marketing teams,

but I felt like, you know, the way that AI is being implemented is sort of a free-for-all. And I was thinking back to my time when I worked at Condi Nast, you know, I think they had Asana onboarded. And we spent months, right? Like learning how to use Asana, what's the right way to use this workflow? And that training isn't happening on marketing teams. And so it feels like there's no philosophies or guardrails for marketers to feel like their boss is, you know, giving to them. Right, devil's advocate question.

I know we're talking about how grim it is to have to work for a boss with AI psychosis. And everyone at the moment hates, seems to hate AI generated content. but you could imagine a world in three to five years, maybe even sooner, three months where we don't, yeah, three months, where we don't actually care anymore. Like, why should we dislike AI-generated social media or marketing content? Well, I think I can speak to it from the brand side, and I do feel like consumers have an expectation that a brand is putting creative effort into things, and the effort that they put into their social media is a reflect.

of the effort that they are putting into their product. And I think that consumers feel that through it. And that has always been true about creative. You know, brands like Nike have, you know, built so much of their world around their, you know, investment into creative. And so it's seen as a shortcut. And it might make you ask, you know, if your favorite Chipotle, whatever, your favorite fast food chain is using AI generated imagery, what other shortcuts might they be taking? in their process. Yeah. I totally agree.

I think from a content standpoint, too, people actually do enjoy AI generated content. It's so crazy on YouTube. I don't know if you guys have noticed, but all these YouTubers are just reading AI generated scripts now, and it's so, and you look at the comments, people would be like, amazing analysis, great scripts.

So I think people actually like it. Sometimes when they don't know they're consuming it, sometimes they actively know they're consuming it. I think people just don't want to feel tricked. That's when it starts to feel bad, because you're like, oh. I think it was your newsletter that I first heard about the, what is it, the fruit slop or the fruit soap operas, et cetera. Yeah.

And I think you made the point. You can have a bunch of people in a comment section. It's like, oh, I'm so disappointed. Oh, you used AI for this. It's disgusting. And then they scroll to the next real. It's like, oh, I love this story about an orange falling in love with a carrot. Fruit Love Island.

Yeah, Fruit Love Island. Yeah. What do you explain this? this disconnect, as you see it? Well, I think that consumers are confused in general over what they should like online right now. And I think that Fruit Love Island feels like a low stakes. They're like, it's a meme. And they don't care about the craft of a meme, but they care about the craft of a company that they purchase from. But, and so I think, yeah, they could be the same person who's, like, yelling at the company for an AI generated menu. And they're sending their

friend AI Fruit Slop. I sort of asked Hayes this question earlier, but in our AI generated world, I guess, how do we feel about existing content or existing incumbents when it comes to social media? Do people who already have an audience who already have a following who maybe have proved authenticity in some way or that they're willing to put effort into their own work, do they become more valuable in this environment, or is it another case of, like, low entry costs, anyone can come in and make content for free? And so we see a sort of further trend of, I guess, what we used to call the democratization of media. Well, I think that, like, if you think about, I think it

depends on the type of content you're making. Are you making deeply parisocial content about, like, your life and your own opinions? So many creators, the value that, like, the way that media was democratized was through how-to content. If you think of, like, even just the early, YouTube videos. It was all makeup, it was how to do this. And I actually think AI is a better authority. Then people will turn to AI for how to fix your dishwasher. Like, it's much easier to get that. So I think those creators are going to struggle. But then there are other creators that are going to use the tools to make great content and they make content that is not easily replicable. You know, maybe it's commentary that's sort of my mom. By the way, she was very

proud. She was telling me that she used chat GPT to fix her toilet recently. Good for her. Which was I wouldn't have expected her to be able to do that. You've heard the chaos. Now you can see it. Hello. Oh my gosh. Watch all your favorite podcasts from start to finish, right inside the free I-Hare Radio app.

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I'm just curious, like, you know, in the last month, you know, a month ago, there was, like, a lot of people arguing about data centers. And then in the last week, there were a bunch of people arguing about data centers. of people arguing about models themselves as this sort of like site of controversy. Do you feel like, let's just say we're talking about AI that like the speed with which the public takes on a new thing is it's just like an extraordinary rapid pace and that's like, oh, you're still arguing about data centers? Wasn't that like a sort of, wasn't that a July issue? Oh, that was so July. I feel like there's, I mean, the social, that you're, there was going to be outrage on social media. Data centers is an issue of 2026. I saw, I think it was like more as

Katz, the political consultant, actually saying, like, people are going to make a mistake and think it's a 2028 election cycle issue. It's actually a very 2026 election cycle issue, and probably by 2028, we will have something new to get mad about. But I think, yeah, the data center discourse has been interesting because those people are against AI for a very different reason than the X-risk people that think it's going to kill all of us. And so far, those people have not really, like, come together to form any sort of coherent coalition. Yeah. So I feel like maybe they should join up, but they have very different interests. And I don't think it's going to kill us, by the way. We're going to be fine.

I was going to ask you. You wrote about the idea of when we talk about rogue AI, potentially killing us, getting the discourse and the language about that possibility, right? Give us the sort of nutshell argument. Like, what is the distinction that we need to be making here? Okay, so first of all, it's not going to kill us. I mean, it's just, like, it's actually so hard to kill all humans on Earth,

like, even if we wanted to. So we're probably. probably going to be fine. I think like what what I think is is concerning or worth interrogating is the way that we anthropomorphize AI and that's what I wrote about is the way that people assign agency to these products. And I think in some ways it's really great to do that because we have to describe how you know you have to sort of describe how they work and but they're not humans and this we are talking about computer programs. And I do think that when we go to these policy debates about liability and stuff, it's really important to recognize that these are not

like truly living beings. I saw one of the former FTC commissioners, he's like, AI isn't going to kill us. We survived the black death, and that only killed 50% of us. So it's like, all right, great. That's a really big...

But also, just because something kills us doesn't mean it's smarter than us. You know, like a virus can kill a lot of people. It's not smarter than them. Okay, on the question of intelligence. So, like, yes, this idea, like, it makes you sick to your stomach to think, like, oh, you've come up with something funny.

And then they're like, well, my buddy Claude doesn't think that it's funny. And that he's just like, oh, my God. But do you see in the marketing world currently productive uses of the technology, whether it's A-B testing things or like, okay, like it's easy to make fun of it, but also AI models do often tend to like do pretty like good answers to things. Do you see positive, productive applications of it in the marketing world? The interesting way that I've seen it is that a lot of agencies will be selling through ideas that they want to do in the real world and in their decks or in a way to help a boss who has maybe a lack of imagination visualize what that big idea is. So I have been interested by using AI to mock something up to then be able to make it in the real world and have like a human impact on it.

So that's that's something that I'm interested in. I don't hear that a lot of marketers are having success, having it generate captions or post ideas. And it's not really a strategy that I personally recommend either. Taylor, how are you using it? Good question. Don't cancel me because people get so mad when you talk about it. But I use it mostly, I kind of like was Rachel saying, as like an assistive tool. I don't think it's a good writing.

Also, if I'm writing, I kind of want to express my thoughts. Like that's the whole point. So I mostly use it for like SEO captions, generating, like, you know, making on the Canva, you know, app, making an image bigger things like that. I also, I wish it could edit. I try out all these AI editing tools. This is why I don't think it's going to kill us just yet. It cannot even edit a podcast. So we're, you know, there's a gap.

One thing I'm curious about from both, for both of you from the perspective of social media is we have 24 hours in the day. I'd say eight of them were sleeping roughly, they're 16. So it's like, okay, maybe you can scroll for 16 hours. But they're going to do a few other things. But now there's like a bunch of that time that once it was spent scrolling might be spend time talking to a chatbot. And I'm curious if you feel it where it's like, setting aside whether AI is useful, not bad in creation,

whether chatbot time is taking away from scrolling time to the detriment of brands and marketers. No. I think getting off of phones and off of technology is more of a threat to. But AI is going to get us off the phones. Like, I do think this meantime is going to tell. Why not? Because a lot of people are chatting using chatbots, right? They're not. They're not.

Social media is entertainment. Yeah. Social media is DMing your friend something who's a real person. Yeah. And I think chatting with a chat bot is a very different function. And I'm more concerned about people. wanting to log off. But when I go to social media,

I tweet something in a bunch of people like, oh, this guy's an idiot. People told me that today. Or Joe, I used to like Joe, but he's lost his mind. Well, maybe I'm using AI too much. I probably am. But what I'm saying is I could then go,

if I use Claude, it's never going to insult me like that. So it's like, well, that's bad. That's bad. Of course it's bad, but I have the iron to resist the temptation. But couldn't a lot of people, it's like, wow, this is much more pleasant. I don't get dunked on when I talk to chat GPT.

the way I do in the comments section on Instagram. I would say that Twitter as a social media platform is so significantly different than TikTok and Instagram where people are scrolling and it's like TV for them and they're not getting insulted on there. And so I think that's a little bit more specific to a Twitter scroller. But don't you think that like screen time?

I think it's so I write a lot about the moral panic over screen time and everybody is so concerned about it. And it is going away. Like I do think that like this form factor of this type of phone is going to die quite soon. and we're seeing wearables, we're seeing, you know, people with the earpods in. Like, I just think we're spending less and less time actually looking at a screen. And I think in the future we're going to interact much more ambiently.

I think a small subset of people want us to believe that personally. I don't see that out in the world. I guess I see that so much where I just see, like, I get what you're saying for entertainment. But in terms of just like your mom, like going to fix the dishwasher, like just all these other times where we used to have to turn to a screen to text up to. But that's a screen, though. Right, but I'm saying, like, if you're asking about, like, looking at our screens, I just think that, like, we're looking at our screens less and less.

And if you check it less, you're going to get sucked in less. But using chat to learn how to fix a toilet is actually, I would have called a plumber and had a real interaction with somebody. I'm just saying, like, if you're arguing a screen, I think that chat versus. I just think there's less and less reasons to be on our phone as we have wearables. As I'm sure you guys saw, like, there was this persona band that came out this week that you can, like, whisper to. Oh, yeah.

I feel, I just feel like everyone's fridge and washing, everything in your home is smart now. Like, I just feel like we're not going to have to do everything through our phone as much, maybe, with the glasses, too. And so I just think that that might end up altering the way that we interact with these media platforms. Totally. I just think that those are equally as antisocial in my opinion. Oh, yeah, no, totally. Yeah, totally. I'm not saying that it's more close social.

We're all agreed on the anti-socialness. Don't worry. We all agree. It's bad. You're going to need dual factor authentication to open your refrigerator. Yeah. Like open your refrigerator and open up your Google off and put in your six-digit code and then I'm back looking at the screen. Wait, can I just ask, on the platforms themselves, in the age of AI slop and essentially free content generation,

do they become more or less powerful? And I can kind of, I could see arguing it from both ways. So like, on the one hand, maybe a bunch of people are going to want to migrate away from X or Instagram, if it's just full of AI and they're not really into that. Maybe we see more people going to DMs and chat groups and discords. Check out the odd thoughts discord, by the way, if you aren't already on it. But on the other hand, maybe curation becomes even more important and maybe having an algorithm that can really tell what you like

and your preference for AI slop or not becomes even more important. How are you thinking about that? I thought you were going to answer first. so I was like, I'm going to have time to think. I think, well, so I do think that the social media platforms are not, they're like on the, their back foot, right? Like, they're not, they're not moving fast enough. I do think, like, in some ways, meta, I mean, Google's better position than meta.

Meta's in a really hard place right now because I think they are very, like, 2010 sort of, like social media. But I think, I don't know, it'll be, it'll depend on how people start to view entertainment and how, like, how much good content can be on that. app. But it's kind of a dinosaur. I don't see meta, like having the same level of influences. I think it kind of peaked in the 2010s. I mean, I think in the short term, what AI is doing to the platforms is a little bit concerning, just in the sense that they can, there's like sort of a scale and quickness that AI accounts. I'll go to look at an AI account that can post, you know,

50 times a day. They're just like pulling the slot machine of Instagram and they're going to get a hit. And so I think that when I looked up recently, what were the top 20 most viewed reels ever? And I think two to three were AI generated, like pretty recent ones. Wow. One of them was showing a set and a wave and how they're filming a wave for a movie and how it would impact or houses. And so it was using the framework of like proof of reality or BTS to essentially confuse people of how they film something, I think that's really bad to essentially monetize confusion. And I think that's a short-term benefit with really bad long-term results. That's why I think people are going to retreat towards these more, these chat interfaces

that are simpler and not so overwhelming and will be more kind of interactive and make them feel less lonely, even though I agree with you. It's not good. Wait, I have a question, speaking of meta, and I may have asked you this before, but I can never remember who uses threads? Oh, my God, we were just talking about this. Yeah, like, no, I'm like aware sometimes, like, what is the deal of thread? I still get thread notifications every once in a while,

and I'm like, oh, what is this thing? And then I remember. Why are they, like, do you have a grand theory of threads? And why is that appeal to her? And I recently published a Hot Takes newsletter, and I said that threads is the most toxic social media platform. Really? Oh, is it. It is by far.

Say why. Well, the way that the algorithm works, it really prioritizes replies. And so you'll get sort of dropped off into somebody's really angry reply to something. And that's the what fuels it, essentially. And it turns into a very quick sort of group think pile on in a way that is surprising. So, Joe, it's not, Twitter is like, Twitter is like, a wonderful fairyland compared to Threads. Are you serious?

It's insane. It also does the AI generated. We were literally just saying about this, but like it makes, threads does the AI generated news summaries, but it's just lying. It just makes things like she was showing me a crazy brand drama on there,

but like it's a crazy place. We only have a few minutes left. So I'm going to ask a question that we sort of alluded to at the beginning, but I'm sure there are a lot of people out in the audience who would like to grow their social media accounts of their presence. But what are your top tips in the age of AI for getting to, as Joe says, an account that mysteriously has 5 million followers?

What are you? I would say the accounts that I see that are growing right now, all their content has a real, like, through line of familiarity. It's like they're creating their own TV show. There's a cook at a restaurant who wears meta glasses and just records what he's cooking. I believe he's grown to like 500,000 followers in maybe two or three months. like Gil Holy Cooks. And so that's all that they post is just like my show is on. They are making an episode every day.

Yeah, it seems to be a lot of like serialized content. It's all becoming shows. You have to really think about entertaining. I think the era of like sharing your life is like very declining. Nobody cares. And I think like, so don't try to be a lifestyle influencer in 2026. It's not, there's a lot of anger towards those people. I'm curious though.

Speaking of the lifestyle influencers, are people signing deals with like, yes, you can use my voice, you can create a digital clone of me, you can have 10 versions of me, like, is that happening? Yeah, I wrote a piece for Vanity Fair recently about this, and CIA has, like, really leaned into this day of what's called the CAA vault, where, like, all of their big stars, like, you know, they use AI to, like, basically cut down on people.

Right now, it's mostly like the influencer will show, or the star celebrity will show up for, like, one day, but then they'll use it to, like, tweak the takes or, you know, tailor it for different audiences. isn't different. And I do think that that is probably the way that it's going to go. I guess Bloomberg owns the rights to our voices. Yeah, we don't really license them. They're going to start generating just endless odd lots. They might do.

You know, one thing I like reading about Rachel in your sub-sac. It's like you talk about like the various tactics, right? Like carousels or what are some of the other ones that are, what's hot these days in terms of like presentation approaches? Well, so Instagram shared with my audience a really helpful chart that showed what each sort of format is for. And so carousels and reels are for reaching a new audience. Okay. Those will go out to non-followers. And what fuels the algorithm right now is non-follower views.

If it's something that only your audience understands, they're like, that's not entertaining enough. We're not going to put it on the main channel. And then single image posts just are for your audience. And then stories and DMs, they see. as where community happens. And there was a conversation, I think, at Bloomberg screen time, actually, where Adam Osseri said that the social and social media is not through sharing, you know, an image of your family anymore necessarily.

It is through DMing your friends, something that reminds me of them. And I thought that was very unfortunate, but clarifying in terms of what it means to be social on social media anymore. And it's really connecting through DMs and sending them a meme that reminds them of them more than an important update in their life. Taylor and Rachel, thank you so much for joining us at Odd Lots Live, closing out the show. It's such a fascinating area. Really appreciate talking to both.

That was our conversation with Taylor Lorenz and Rachel Carton recorded live at our show in L.A. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alley. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our guests, Taylor Loren. She's at Taylor Lorenz and Rachel Carton at Milk Carton. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armin, Dash O'Bennett, Dashobin'Hall Benet at DashBot,

Kail Brooks at Kail Brooks, and Kevin Lazzano at Kevin Lloyd Lazzano. And for more Oddlots content, you should check out our daily newsletter. You can find that at Bloomberg.com forward slash oddlots. And you can chat about all these topics 24-7 in our Discord. Discord.g.g. slash oddlaws. And if you enjoyed this conversation, then please leave a comment or like the video or better yet. Subscribe. Thanks for watching and listening.

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