Platform generated AI slop at scale

2025-11-02 22:41:12 +01:00 by Mark Smith

There is an interesting piece on the latest Vergecast episode [34:15] with David Pierce and Nilay Patel about the immanent death of the creator economy. There is lots of good discussion, but the real catch is a quote they pulled from a recent Meta earnings call in which Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that we are entering the 3rd era of social media.

According to Zuck the 1st era was all about sharing content generated by family and friends, the second era was when they added the creator content, and the third era is AI generated content that will be added “ontop” of the first two kinds. It sure is an interesting choice of words.

Nilay has this to say about it:

“There is only so many people in the world Mark. And they only have so much time in the day. Supply and demand dictates that if you add much more content to the feeds, the attention will be taken from something else. I know where the attention will be taken from, cause you are not paying friends, family and the elementary school parents group, you are paying the creators. You are going to take the money away from the creators with your universe, your corpus of AI content.”

It’s one of those extremely obvious points that is worth saying out loud, especially because the creator economy hasn’t exactly been having the best of times recently. But Meta aren’t the only ones. OpenAI is heading in this direction at a shocking pace, they have gone from non-profit, to possibly the biggest profit maximizers in all of human existence, entering into any market that has even a hint of action.

Platforms competing with their users isn’t exactly a new thing, it’s unfortunately a re-occurring theme in tech. It seems we are about to enter into another era of the platforms eating their users. #