It's getting sloppy

In my quest to find interesting content to put into Ideas Quarterly I’m often losing hours to LinkedIn, TikTok, Inoreader, Substack and other platforms each day. Those feeds are inspiring and overwhelming in equal measure. Part of the issue is that ‘AI slop’ is already getting in the way of the good stuff. John Oliver did a brilliant piece on this last week (there’s a cut down version of it here on YouTube), highlighting how platforms like Pinterest are now completely overrun with AI. The real problem is AI is now in the hands of professional spammers who are building content factories with unprecedented speed and scale, leading to floods of ‘AI slop’ in social media.

So what’s the solution? For me, it’s increasingly “don’t start on social”. I’m realising that I have to start in “proper” places on the web. For example, I’m currently writing a feature on the importance of sleep, in particular naps, to trigger brilliant ideas. To find the source material for this I’m using sites like MIT News to see the experiments in sleep that all those smart MIT students are doing - like the Dormio study (image below). That study would never have appeared in any of my feeds. Instead, I’d probably be served up a “How I hacked my dreams and made millions” TikTok video fronted by an AI presenter spouting unscientific nonsense.

This post suddenly feels like an anti-AI rant, which it’s not meant to be. It’s really just an observation that the clever AI tools have fallen into the wrong hands already, which is starting to destroy the value (to me) of many of my content feeds.

Now back to writing my magazine feature, as long as I’m not lured onto TikTok by those AI cats jumping off diving boards.