Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - The AI Slop-pocalypse: How The Slop Economy Took Over

Episode Date: October 1, 2025

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON!!Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 AI slop is slowly taking over every platform. "But the flood of finan...cially incentivized sloe has also given way to a strange new internet, where social media feeds overflow with unsettlingly lifelike imagery and even real videos can appear suspect," WaPo reports. "Some viral clips now barely rely on humans at all, with AI tools generating not just the imagery but also the ideas."There's YouTube Slop, Instagram Reel Slop, Slop all over TikTokk LinkedIn, and X. But who's behind this deluge of deranged and often extremely surreal content? Drew Harwell is a journalist at the Washington Post and he's been digging into the slop economy. He joins me to talk about the mad rush of creators using AI video tools to flood the internet, how they're making money, and what the future of content looks like as slop eats the world.If you like this video, please support me on Patreon!! Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0 https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 The White House is one of the most prolific distributors of AI content at this point. At a time when President Trump says anything making him look bad is AI, it is terrible. And people are using it because it's effective. It works. As AI continues to eat the internet, it feels like more and more every single platform is becoming completely overrun with Slop. There's YouTube Slop, Instagram Reels Slop, Slop all over TikTok, LinkedIn, X, and elsewhere. But who's behind this deluge of deranged and often extremely surreal content? Drew Harwell is a journalist at the Washington Post, and he's been digging into the Slop economy.
Starting point is 00:00:43 Today, we're going to talk about the mad rush of creators using AI video generation tools to flood the internet with Slop, how they're making money, what the future of content looks like in a Slop-dominated world, and whether or not we've reached peak slop. Hi, Drew, welcome to my podcast. Hey, Taylor. Thanks for having me. So I want to talk about slop today with you because he wrote this great story. And I feel like you're also a fellow slop connoisseur, a slopper, as somebody on TikTok
Starting point is 00:01:10 recently called the people that consume and repose too much slop. So before we sort of like dive into the world of slop, I want to talk about like where it emerged from because I feel like this term suddenly came up. And it feels like this recent phenomenon. But is there a moment or something that like you can really pinpoint that sort of is the beginning of the slop era online where we started to see sort of like the genesis of a lot of this content. I don't know. I mean, that's a great question because I feel like the roots of it kind of go back to like, I've been thinking about memes and brain rot and these kind of like crunchy memes where
Starting point is 00:01:43 they went from being fairly well produced. People would, you know, take some time to make them look good to where their lack of quality became like their main attribute. And it was like somebody had just pumped them out. And they just were like poorly produced. They were, like, poorly produced. They were weird. They didn't make sense. They were just kind of made to go viral. And so I think the Slop idea definitely predates AI, AI, just kind of industrialized them. It's clearly a social platform thing. Like, it's clearly Slop only exists in a place where people can share it widely, thoughtlessly, and it can go viral. I really like what you said, actually, about Slop predating AI, because I am with you. I think we both probably worked in media during the Facebook
Starting point is 00:02:29 video era. And I think about some of the content that even I produced back then of like just extremely extremely low quality video that was aimed at like feeding this algorithmic desire for content. And I feel like mobile video obviously took off in the early 2010s, but even by the second half of the 2010s, tech companies really wanted more video content and they kind of couldn't get enough of it. This is like during that pivot to video era of meta and everything where they said like, you know, the whole platform's going to be video soon. And so people were making just like, they didn't have the AI tools to make it, but I feel like you started to see a lot more like automated like video content
Starting point is 00:03:06 and just like people sort of churning out this like low quality viral chum. And it's hard to explain because like before there was slop, I kind of thought in my mind of it just being sludge. It was just like this layer of shapeless, just like gunk that would just kind of cover the platforms and kind of like fill in all the cracks. And when I try to explain this to like normies whose brains aren't like pickled by the internet, I try to like tell them it's not just like dumb content. Like you can appreciate dumb content, right?
Starting point is 00:03:33 Like I watch dumb TV every night. But the thing about like slop is just like you said, it's kind of like mass produced for the only real aim of it is to like satisfy the algorithm and gain some like viral advantage that has nothing to do with like people appreciating it. It's just like taking every element of the recipe for like algorithmic promotion and just like trying to fit as much of it. into one piece of content as you can.
Starting point is 00:04:00 Basically not caring about the human element of it, but just trying to like satisfy the server. It's like content that's made for machines almost, right? Like it's like made for the algorithms desires and to sort of perform well online. Yeah, we had slop in early social video. Anything where it was like the premise was really like half baked and this kind of awful execution product. And then AI just kind of supercharged it because it made it so like anybody could chase that
Starting point is 00:04:28 virality and that algorithmic advantage by just like using some tool without even having to think about it. So let's talk a little bit more about like the emergence of these tools. There is this test, which you mentioned in your story called the Will Smith eating spaghetti test. I don't even know if that's an official name, but it's sort of this like unofficial maybe test for AI where basically Will Smith is eating a bowl of spaghetti and it's like how well can the AI render that? And I think back in 2022 it basically couldn't render that and there were all these like terrifying like gruesome attempts, but certainly now it can. I'm trying to kind of pinpoint when that turning point was, because I do think, like,
Starting point is 00:05:04 it was maybe around 2023 where things started to change and like the sort of widespread consumer tools became good enough where you could start to produce your own sort of like storyline content. Yes, absolutely. You know, Google started getting involved and there was stuff like SORA. The other AI giants also kind of moved into video because video became more of just an achievable problem for the AI companies. And yeah, the early Will Smith eating spaghetti test, which is actually the name of the Wikipedia page. So I'll just pretend that's the official name. But this was something that the developers would talk about too because they were excited at the moment because they were like, okay, this video looks like, you know, this weird monster eating like the spaghetti makes no sense. But they were excited because they were moving from, we've done text, we've done images, and now we've moved into video. Video was always such a difficult domain because it's like you're doing 30 to 60 frames per second. You have to be creating a lot. And the AI rendering was it just very high impact. So once they started actually being able to compete in that way, and you saw, yeah, Google and Open AI and meta,
Starting point is 00:06:08 like, and even some of these smaller kind of AI shops start putting out text to video creation tools that they would offer to people, often at a loss, right? Like often not charging people all that they would have to normally pay to create that. I think that's when you started seeing the explosion of it. And it went from the domain of just like, AI researchers and developers just like doing it for shits and giggles to like anybody being able to do it for pretty cheap from their home computer by again, just typing out text, like just
Starting point is 00:06:39 doing prompt engineering from their computer. So that's when it really exploded. I feel like it was really cool to do that with images at first because everyone was like, oh my god, mid-journey. Oh my god, look at the fake images. Wow. Like this is going to fool so many people. And I think that was like 2022, 2023 really.
Starting point is 00:06:52 And then by 2024, it was like video because I wrote about sort of the proliferation of I think some of the earliest slop videos, which were these cat videos, these like weird cat narratives, which are still among, like, that is among some of the most popular content on YouTube shorts, which is crazy even today. But it's these basically animal storylines that don't have any kind of language around them. It seems like part of what's driving this whole, like, slop economy is the monetary aspect of it, which is the fact that like, especially on YouTube, they're getting a portion of ad revenue, right? So you're incentivized to create content to perform well in the feed and get paid or even just generate your own currency of followers.
Starting point is 00:07:27 So you kind of like dug into the businesses behind some of this slop economy, for lack of a better word. Like, what does it look like? I mean, do we have any sort of like big players in this space? Is it mostly hobbyists making this content? Like, who's generating most of the like online video slop right now? Yeah, it's a lot of hobbyists. Yeah. I mean, it's just people who have a day job and are working from home. When I set out to like talk to these people, I didn't really know what I was going to get.
Starting point is 00:07:52 As you've reported for a long time, like, there's all sorts of different creator operations for like normal social social social. social media content where you have some people who just do it by themselves, you have like teams with managers. So I kind of expected a bigger range of like operations for this. But with AI video, I ended up talking to a bunch of people across the US and other countries. And these were not like institutional, traditional creators at all. Like these were just like people who like, one was in college and she was 20 years old and she was like trying to be a streamer, but also trying to like get her psychology.
Starting point is 00:08:27 degree and she was pausing her degree because she wanted to focus on AI video. One was like working for his dad's company and he felt like he had the technical skills to create this. All of these people were driven by the money. They felt like I have this AI tool. It's like my secret weapon. I can go on to social media. Who knows how viral I can get. And it was just completely like a capitalist incentive like impulse driving them. It's interesting because like of course we appreciate and understand that. But also it's like, okay, when you see the incentive structure is designed to maximize the amount of slop that's being created. There is some good slop, but a lot of it is just like terrible and just floods our feeds and we don't appreciate it.
Starting point is 00:09:06 The incentive structure is totally out of whack because you're basically incentivizing people to poison the internet with a bunch of like gunk. And yeah, that move from images to video was really interesting because like anybody could make the images and they were, I mean, these people put them out on basically every platform they could. They started creating workflows for themselves that like one of the creators I talked to, one of his steps for making these AI videos became he would tell it to create his little like logo of like an infinity sign in every video because he started worrying about people ripping off his videos and putting them on their own channel. So he's like, okay, I need to watermark these.
Starting point is 00:09:43 So it just became like this business overnight for these people. And you started seeing these operations, yeah, really lean into just like completely weird role-playing. things that were just very low-level cocoa-mellon style animations just because they thought it would go globally viral and they didn't care about the quality of it. It was just all about like, how can I make the most money off YouTube shorts?
Starting point is 00:10:06 It's interesting that it is mostly hobbyists and that like big companies haven't gotten involved yet because at the same time, I mean, you talk about this in your story too, but like you have all these like hobbyists producing slop on like a, I guess sort of a mass distributed scale flooding YouTube and social platforms. And then you also have like Ted Sarandos at Netflix talking about
Starting point is 00:10:24 like how they're also going to, I mean, they wouldn't call it Slop probably, but like all of actual Hollywood is also leaning so hard into AI and like AI generated videos. Then you also have, I think Open AI is going to release their first ever actually AI generated movie called Critters. It seems like there's like this high and low aspect to Slop, but there's not really that like operational Slot media company yet. Yeah. And maybe that'll change because one of the things that makes Slop so appealing is it's cheap. And if you're a big movie studio and you want to save money on these pesky humans who demand salaries, and you feel like you can turn to the AI for something that maybe is not as perfect as they would make it, but like is good enough.
Starting point is 00:11:03 You're going to do that. And I think we're seeing more studios do this. And you know, you remember, because we've reported on this during the Hollywood strikes. This was a big thing that producers, animators, creators were getting really worried about was AI is going to be taking our job is kind of the superficial way of saying it. But it's like they're going to be taking components of our jobs gradually until we're going to be less. needed. And yeah, you saw this with Netflix where they had this movie, they needed to like blow up a building. And instead of getting animators to do it and having it look good, they basically just used AI to do it. And Ted Sarando said, yeah, like, it looked great. For them, it's just a couple of seconds on film.
Starting point is 00:11:40 And so these kind of questions of integrity or whatever, so they went for us. I think we're going to see a lot more of this because these studios want to save money. And AI is a great money saver for them. Well, so far the studios have not entered into like, I think, I would say the most common genre of slop, which is brain rot slop. I kind of want to dive into the different types of slop and kind of what they should say about the internet. And I feel like the brain rot slop, it sort of is what mainstreamed slop and AI content. Like, I mean, the cat videos are certainly brain rot.
Starting point is 00:12:11 But also there's all these interesting like narratives and characters, like brain rot characters that are just AI slop characters essentially that have become popular. I wrote about the Tim Cheese versus Simon Claw, like that whole lore. But if you follow a lot of these, like, news aggregator pages that post fan updates about these slop storylines, like, it seems like there's this whole, like, cinematic universe emerging of slop characters. I mean, I guess the Italian brain rat, like,
Starting point is 00:12:36 tra-la-la-la-tra-la-type stuff was also in that realm. What I've seen happening, especially on TikTok, is people will make an AI-slop character that does really well. There were these videos where Bigfoot was talking into, like, a selfie camera, while narrating and running away from people. And they used AI to make it. It was very popular for whoever made it. And then everybody started copying it
Starting point is 00:13:01 because it only takes five seconds to type that into your AI. And so people started making copycat accounts. You couldn't tell who was the original. And people started iterating on that concept and making Bigfoot run in different places, say different things. So you have these mini storylines developing off any single thing that goes viral, which is classic meme culture, but when anybody can do it
Starting point is 00:13:27 and when you can make money off of it, that is where it becomes really interesting. So you have that. And then on TikTok, I've seen a lot of fake influencers where they just create a fake person who will be doing, get ready with me content, sneaking out of the house,
Starting point is 00:13:43 classic genres that are popular on the platform. The AI influencer thing drives me a little bit crazy because I feel like it's something that is so incredibly hyped by the media, but I don't see a lot of these accounts getting traction yet where like they are actually quite literally, it's usually a young pretty woman, right? Where they're like trying to like replicate like a lifestyle influencer, I guess, but make it AI. It's like little Michaela, but like, you know, AI version basically. And I kind of wonder how much that is the future. Like I'm sure there'll be
Starting point is 00:14:12 some like that. But to me like because there's not a lot of like storylines attached to those creators and it mostly is just about like lifestyle product stuff, which is sort of most people want from humans, I just wonder how much traction those types of AI influencers will ultimately get. I really doubt any of these genres are the future because they are made stale so quickly. And the slop creators I talked to were the first people to say that. They were like, we are going to make ourselves obsolete almost immediately because the reason you watch an influencer is you care about that person, you want to see what they do, you like their vibe with these AI influencers.
Starting point is 00:14:50 There's nothing there. You see the video and you're interested for a half second until you find out that it's not real, and then you move on. So these people were basically just glomming on to what they thought was trendy, and they thought that could get them somewhere else. But I agree. The core of what people are interested in on social media has not changed, and AI has not changed that. They do want storylines. They want something that will compel them beyond just the superficial look of the AI. But there's no reason why they can't use AI to kind of create those longer narratives that they feel like they can drive.
Starting point is 00:15:26 I mean, that's going to be the question because they actually transform this from something where they can make a quick buck, but it doesn't last to an actual legitimate business. Yeah, I do think they're like increasingly developing kind of storylines and IP. And maybe it's very like crowdsourced IP, which is going to be a nightmare if they ever try to like take one of these things and make it into something. But I don't know if you saw that that account, it's on Instagram, might be on TikTok. talk to of the baby being interviewed and she goes on trips with her aunt Linda. It's like, I'm a baby and I was just born. I can't even begin to describe it.
Starting point is 00:15:57 This content is so bizarre. And like, you know, I clicked on that account and I clicked on it right when it launched. And it had, you know, the first video went viral, but I was like, I will see where it goes. It's been sort of like developing the storyline about this baby. It has 80,000 followers and people are making these sort of side. Like you said, it's very meme culture, kind of like collaborative storytelling. And I could see something like that eventually getting enough traction to like be interesting to like a a streamer where they develop a show around it or getting a manager or whatever.
Starting point is 00:16:22 Like that feels kind of similar, honestly, to like, 1.0, like, influencer culture where you had, like, dug the pug or whatever, where, or like, these stuffed animals where people would create these Instagram accounts around, like, certain physical animals and sort of telling a storyline about it, but it was all made up, you know? I guess aside from, like, the fictional content, another big genre of slop that I see all the time, especially on YouTube, is educational slop and, like, history slop. and basically the whole like faceless channel type stuff. I'm curious you've talked to any creators
Starting point is 00:16:54 that were sort of making anything like that. Yes, and I've seen that. And it's, there is a big movement for a fake history slop where they can take content that other people had created like actual history creator, researcher types and just use the AI to spit out a bunch of texts that they can use and then creating, using that as the backbone for a video where they basically just generate a bunch of content.
Starting point is 00:17:20 That works because people did it in a human way before and created a template. And now they're kind of getting more into that. And you actually saw this on Reddit where they would have these fake history communities, and they kind of just did it as a, on a lark, like, just for fun. But now you've started seeing people do it more where they don't announce that it's all BS
Starting point is 00:17:40 and the facts are wrong. And a lot of these genres just purely seem to exist because of the novelty. Like, they're just counting on people swiping onto it and not understanding what they're seeing and hoping nobody digs further and just like getting that early click. And obviously that's problematic because, you know, you're poisoning the well of like history content that people actually want to learn about maybe in the future. But again, it's they just see like money being made from this. Do you mean fake history like conspiracy theories? Well, there was like a line of fake history where people would invent a fake earthquake that hit Seattle in 1980.
Starting point is 00:18:18 And they would just invent like a giant catastrophe or like a roller coaster exploded or some of its fake history. Some of it's just fake news, I guess we would say. But it's just like complete spectacle, horrifies you, it shocks you. And they say that they have the full story. But again, they're just kind of like praying on people who don't know that it's fake. I think like one of the most corrosive and toxic ways that Slop is affecting our media ecosystem is by polluting people's information environment. And I'm thinking of this kind of highly politicized slop that we're seeing, especially in the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting,
Starting point is 00:18:53 or there was this big far right rally in the UK where somebody created a slot video pretending to interview like LGBTQ people protesting, also talking about Charlie Kirk. And these videos seem to be so heavily engaged with. People above the age of 50 seem to not be like able to tell that they're real at all. What do you make of the rise of this like political slop? And who do you think is behind some of that stuff? Yeah, I mean, it's rage bait, right?
Starting point is 00:19:18 It's AI rage bait. And rage bait has been a basic product of the social media age that is used on every platform by so many people. And it's effective because even if 90% of the people know what's happening, no, it's fake. No, it's just designed to piss you off. Like 10% won't. And you're on the internet where the scale is so much higher. I actually totally disagree. Like rage bait was previously like, oh, I posted an inflammatory tweet.
Starting point is 00:19:45 What are you going to do, live? like, you know, cry about it. This is like video content that is very pervasive on YouTube shorts especially. I mean, I'm thinking of like the Baron Trump singing after Trump's inauguration or like all of the stuff around that girl that was murdered, the woman, the blonde woman, the Ukrainian woman, I think, that was murdered on the bus,
Starting point is 00:20:04 you know, that the people were creating, where it does seem sort of dangerous. Like, it's inflammatory and it, but it seems like it has the ability to generate rage in a much worse way because it's so kind of like emotional and real to people. It's supercharged. I mean, what they're trying to do is maximize their spread by pissing off as many people as possible.
Starting point is 00:20:26 And it's not rage bait in the traditional sense in that it's really based off something. It's like, we're going to invent a character for you to be mad at. And then we're going to monetize your anger at that. And it works because if you watch this video of the fake UK counter protesters saying all of this stuff and they have blue hair and they're just like signature, liberal, saying all this stuff that angers you. If you agree that those people are terrible, you're going to share it to say,
Starting point is 00:20:54 hey, we're validated, like people on my side, we were right, these people are terrible, even though they're all fake. And if you watch it and you know that it's BS, you might still end up sharing it because you want people to see what these people are doing to attack your side. And it works because it just agitates everybody.
Starting point is 00:21:14 Beyond this video, I mean, I saw this for even some of the slop people I talked to, where if you made a racist joke or a sexist joke or a joke that was homophobic, they would get a bigger spread for their content because they would just tap into people's emotions and get people pissed off. And when you're pissed off, you're engaging with the platform more.
Starting point is 00:21:33 You're sharing the content. I guess to me, it seems like it's more insidious than just rage. Because, I mean, even like, for instance, that viral Tim Waltz's AI video where he's wearing some crazy shirt and Joe Rogan fell for it, of course, because again, somehow no one over the age of 50 can detect very obvious AI. I don't understand it. No hate to like the elder people, but it's weird. But, you know, like that, it seems like there are political motives. And it also seems like
Starting point is 00:22:02 the right tends to embrace it at a scale that the left certainly doesn't. And obviously that's because a lot of the people on the left are critical of AI and the right is embracing it. But like, you know, conservatives, especially in the wake of Charlie Kirk's killing, like, They have generated so much AI content around this. And the White House itself is sharing AI slop content. The White House is one of the most prolific distributors of AI content at this point. And we've also seen this happening at a time when President Trump says anything making him look bad as AI. So yeah, it is terrible.
Starting point is 00:22:35 And people are using it because it's effective. It works. Like you can make a political point with this AI tool and agitate people. and make the other side look terrible and score political points and make money and get followers. It's all wrapped into one. So it's kind of like not a surprise that people are using AI to make the worse. I know, but like what do you think that that means?
Starting point is 00:22:58 Like what do you think that that means for our information ecosystem and the internet, basically? That it's so susceptible to this kind of poisoning. It strikes to why we should care about the internet in the first place. If we are all looking at the same feed, and wanting to understand our world better. And then you have this incentive structure where any one person around the world
Starting point is 00:23:22 can type a few keys and like piss you off and make the truth of the matter that much more obscure. That's a huge problem. And the other part of it is like, what is the counter incentive to this? Like, this guy who created this video and then shared it, it's a complete BS video, right? There's nothing real to it.
Starting point is 00:23:41 And his punishment for sharing this bullshit is, getting millions of views, millions of followers, like, why wouldn't he share AI? You know, if his whole thing is about pissing people off and winning the political argument, there's no reason why he shouldn't. So I think that speaks to, like, we're complete, our platforms are completely not ready for this kind of material. And most normal people aren't either, because the video quality is getting so much better. I mean, I think it, you know, we laugh when people like Joe Rogan and many others mistake this stuff as real.
Starting point is 00:24:12 but it's designed to look real, you know, and the ways we used to be able to detect AI don't work anymore because they are so legitimate. So you tell people to have better media literacy and to think before they share, and of course they should be doing that. But it's also like when the material is this good and this deceptive, it's just going to keep happening and get worse.
Starting point is 00:24:32 To me, like, I think the response to everything that you just said, a lot of people's response to it is like, okay, well, that's why we need to ban it. That's why we need to ban AI. That's why we need to ban social media. like da-da-da-da-da. And I think that that is so wrong, obviously, but I do think it makes a very strong case for why we shouldn't have such a profit-driven internet and like why I think allowing anybody to profit off solely just like engagement and views culture is like really dangerous and bad.
Starting point is 00:25:00 Because I think like, I mean, you said you spoke to these people that are essentially just hobbyists, which is great. Like we want everybody to be able to come online and build a platform and monetize and make their own media company. I do think that that's like broadly a good thing. But when you see the way that these like AI tools can warp that and just how quickly people can spin up an account and start, especially on X basically, thanks to Elon, and start monetizing just like the worst AI slop rage bait, like it becomes a problem. And if we had a less profit-driven internet and if the goal of all of these platforms wasn't just to maximize engagement for profit, I feel like we wouldn't have the slop problem that we have today. Because so much of slop, I mean, you started by saying this. It's just there to make money. Yeah. And this is something that YouTube has talked about.
Starting point is 00:25:45 YouTube is flooded with Slop. A lot of the most popular videos are AI-generated material of nothing by these faceless accounts that have no content of their own. It's just stolen. And I actually talked to some researchers who looked at AI Slop creators in China. There's a huge market there. And it's become basically a form of gig work where the same people who were doing spam emails or fake websites or, you know, you know,
Starting point is 00:26:11 you know, as a business, have moved into AI video because they see that they can reach all the platforms. It's a quicker way to money. And so, yeah, I think a lot of this rests in the central clearinghouse of the platforms. So I think the platforms need to disincentivize this material from just going viral and rewarding it. And like you said, find a better metric to evaluate content on rather than just pure raw virality. Because the original sin of social media is when you set a metric, and aim people at it to be rewarded, they're just going to maximize and optimize for that material.
Starting point is 00:26:47 So if you reward people on views, they're going to do whatever they can to get views, including making racist AI videos that fool people, including Joe Rogan. I want a feed that is a human feed, which sounds so corny. But, like, I mean, YouTube talked about rewarding channels that are just, like, human made.
Starting point is 00:27:04 And I know, like, listen, I use AI tools to edit my own videos. So, you know, I'm not saying, like, everything has to be 100% million. manually edited no AI. But even if I could just make sure that I had a feed that was like just human content where I know that it's like a human being behind it, like a verified human feed, I wish I could honestly have that for like all my social channels because it's just it's so hard. And it's so hard to separate like the actual human content from this like faceless slop
Starting point is 00:27:33 garbage. And I think we will have that. I think the market is going to be there for people saying I'm sick of seeing this stuff because again, it really has a lot. low shelf life. And I think whoever creates that human feed and rewards that will profit off of it. Because my main piece of copium taking away from looking at a lot of AI slop, and I think this is probably the case for anybody else who's been looking at a lot of AI content, is it really ups the value for human content. Like the more AI stupid videos that I watch, the more I'm like,
Starting point is 00:28:03 my God, I would do anything to watch just like a human being talk normally for five minutes. And in some ways, I think that's fantastic. Like it's reminding us. what we actually like from the pieces of art and media that we see out there. And I think there is a value to, I want to see somebody actually take time to make something and pour some energy and sweat and effort into it and make something unique, not just assemble all of these different parts into a marketable commodity so they can get more TikTok views. I always think about this kind of media as like a sine wave. And right now the wave is like up to AI.
Starting point is 00:28:41 and I think there will be a backlash as we start to just have a hangover from it and just overdose on it. The more people who do it, the more content that just gets churned out at industrial pace, we're just going to reject it. And I think the humans will win. Maybe we're at peak slop or we're reaching peak slop soon. The creators I talked to felt like we were reaching peak slop, which was fascinating to me because it's like, that's their business now. And maybe Slap will just look different. But yeah, well, the one I talked to really, he struck me because he said,
Starting point is 00:29:08 When we have basically every form of media at our fingertips and can watch anything and see anything in any permutation, like, will any of it be enjoyable to us anymore? Like, will we find any of it entertaining? Or will we just completely reject it and go take a walk and just, like, be away from it. And it's kind of, you know, for him to say that, it's the reason he can pay for his rent, basically. I think we're all going to be having that realization because does it really serve us? Does it really, does it bring us joy or is it just the thing that's on our feed? Thank you so much for chatting with me today. Yeah, thanks for having me.
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