Content but not content (about it).
Running on slop fumes. Hungry for more.
My colleagues and clients are using AI.
Good.
My colleagues and clients are using AI, and it’s creating more work for me.1
Less good.
My brain struggles to latch on to a lot of the information that they’re sharing and I’ve been trying to think of why this is the case.
Here’s my running hypothesis.
AI removes the narrative threads from our documents, from our notes, and from our presentations. Everything gets replaced with well-timed fragments and sentence blips.
When I realize something has been created with AI, I start to think about whether the person actually made an effort.
I think about the person instead of the content. I think about the person while I’m trying to digest the content.
Bullet point lists and sentence blips punch (list) my brain and fail to stick in my memory. Nothing gets eaten. Nothing gets digested. Informationally speaking.
I skip down a few bullets or sentences and then back up three more, not remembering what I’ve read. When I can’t remember what I’ve read, I’m not sure what to do with it… and probably end up re-doing it.
Lists are how we forget.
As I watch an increasing number of the people around me use AI to communicate for whatever reasons, and as I sense my own attention (and tolerance) for it waning, I can’t help but wonder:
How will we share important information with one another in the future?
When will we pivot back to telling stories that keep our attention and help us remember?
When I typed this sentence, I had corporate intentions, so to speak, but it feels like a much meatier Human Problem.
The enshittification of prose via AI has already started to fragment social communities.
Robin Moffatt made this point; more specifically, that AI slop is strangling Reddit threads and Slack channels: “AI slop is driving up the noise, and making the signal more and more difficult to discern in communities.”
Slop up. Signal down.
Communities crumble.
(Lazy) AI content creation shifts a productivity gain to a cost transfer, from the creator to the consumer.
To be sure, the fix is to not not use AI. (Would AI have plagued you with a double negative like this? I think not. You’re welcome.)
The fix is don’t ship shi* raw AI output.
So many of us have expectations that AI will automagically yield, or should automagically yield, the content outputs we want.
I don’t think we have quite the right mental models around the fact that AI tools help us accelerate, but they don’t fully take over the wheel.
AI speeds up content creation, but complete autopilot comes at a cost. Need we reference early self-driving vehicles.
This time the crash (and burn) is literary, attentional, and reputational.
I was weirdly delighted to learn that this had already been termed. Brandolini’s Law aka the Asymmetry of Bullshit states: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”