Even social networks have had enough of machine-generated content
‘Dead Internet’ theory has always been an exaggeration, but a productive one. The idea that the Internet is populated entirely, or even largely, by quasi-autonomous entities engaging only with other similar entities is not literally true, nor likely to ever be so, but it does force us to think about the reasons for both production and consumption of, well, anything.
It is certainly the case that social media has been swamped by ‘content’ created using AIs, thereby diminishing both its utility and, broadly, any desire a growing number of us have to use it at all.
In a way, though, you might say this is much like the economy. Many businesses, most of them productive and some actually useful, do not trade with individuals at all. Nevertheless, their activity, economic, intellectual or material, is no less real for that. System-building component manufacturers, for instance, do not sell to the public; they sell to other parts of the construction industry. An exchange occurs, as does creation and transfer of value, regardless of wherever that value initially happens to land.
Business-to-business activity has no consumer-facing exchange, but whatever it is that is being done, does eventually get used by some-one. On the contrary, dead content goes unconsumed.
Where dead cultural production – unread blogs, a bottomless pit of LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos as signs only of motion and not actual results, a certain amount of boilerplate corporate communications, some (famously unknowable) amount of advertising and a lot more besides, arguably including, if you want to slap the author, this very piece itself – differs is that absent the human at the other end it produces no actual value.
The old point about machines being ‘dead labour’ always seemed, to me at least, to only tell half of the story: yes, a worker creates more value because they have other points of interaction with the economy, but the machine, in theory at least, does increase productivity. What we do with this extra productivity is not just a question of managing the working day, it has a real impact on the world.
Busy without being productive
What we are now seeing goes far beyond a few LinkedIn posts. According to a recent report, the 35th USENIX Security Symposium, due to be held next week in the US, has been virtually smothered by submissions: around 3,030 papers were submitted, up on 2,400 the previous year.
Crucially, this is not a one-off. The report goes on to note that a scholarly paper published in April, “found that since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, submission volume at major academic journals has increased 42%.”
Nor is it confined to either IT security or academia. The authors of several recently–published, and soon to be published, pieces of fiction have been accused of using AI to write their stories. It’s not hard to imagine how agents and editors feel right now, seeing the slush pile grow at a more than exponential rate.
There is another, somewhat less examined, issue, though, and it applies to an awful lot of the things we put out into the world, not just novels: we are at a point where some may simply think ‘what’s the point?’ and, therefore, decide to make nothing at all. This is, I suppose, fair enough – but it is also an overreaction.
‘What’s the point’ is the right question to be asking, though: there has never been a business, nor for that matter an individual, who, when confronted with their own actions, was harmed by asking ‘why are we creating this specific thing, and for whom? What do we actually want, here?’
Some of the material being bashed out does have inherent value. Corporate communications are not worthless, and while marketing and advertising are not really as quantifiable as we might like, they clearly influence behaviour. In such a context, some amount of automation is not a problem. But intent needs to come before production.
If we actually bore that in mind perhaps we’d worry less about AI-generated ‘content’ because we’d be producing a lot less, regardless of how it is made, and at least have got our intentions in order. Dreamland, I know.
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, verbiage vortex LinkedIn has itself now been forced to build strategies to deal with AI-generated content. AI-generated content that is created using the very tools LinkedIn gave to its users. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.
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