Am I to believe that those 700K+ downloads are organic traffic? Who's listening to all this stuff?
So to answer your question, I think we all do, it's just that different audiences have different sets of topics for which they let their guard down.
There is a huge market for content that makes you feel smart without requiring thinking and makes you busy without requiring work. I'm not not saying it's inherently bad. I'm listening to music on my daily commute and it's the same thing: just enjoyable filler so that you can do something other than getting angry at other drivers. The internet just weaponized the formula, and now AI is the equivalent of nuclear weapons I guess.
If someone listens to a couple of minutes of a 30 minute slopfest and nopes away, is that counted as a listen?
Your example of HN sending views to shit is interesting, because I presume a lot of people sometimes click on a link expecting something insightful and is greeted by bullshit. A view is counted, but no meaningful interaction happened.
It doesn’t matter if no one is listening. Equally saturating all channels, metrics and indicator is enough to create hindrance so preventing relevant information to spread in meaningful time.
Attention is all you need, so distraction is all that will be given.
This content is made by humans but is pointless grindingly stupid filler spiced with a dash of obviously performative offensiveness. You're basically listening to a complete loser (or someone LARPing as one) telling you about their boogers and then being racist and then playing video games for 6 hours.
But it's wildly popular. Millions of people stream this kind of shit for hours every day.
There's a lot of people out there who just want to numb their brains, and there seems to be no floor. You can just keep making it dumber. The stuff people stream (and doom scroll) on the Internet makes 1980s daytime soaps look like high art from a lost golden age.
So it's not at all surprising that millions of people listen to low-quality un-curated AI slop podcasts.
I actually unsubbed from the podcast I heard. Meta discussion of crap like this isn't much better than the content itself. Keep driving. Do not look at the car accident.
I had kind of an epiphany like that in the last year. The Information Age means information is free. It costs $0 and is produced to infinity. That means you are not missing anything. Your attention is actually 100% yours, and if you choose to ignore the car wreck that's fine. There are infinity car wrecks. There are infinity everything. Keep driving.
If you let your brain stem drive you’ll spend your life scrolling political rage bait and slop.
Whether the slop is made by humans or machines doesn’t much matter. I kind of think the AI thing is a red herring, though AI does make it possible to make a lot of slop. So maybe AI is the thing that forces the issue.
--H. L. Mencken (or at least attributed so.)
I wouldn't be surprised if the same dynamic is playing out with these AI slop podcasts.
Dead Internet Theory.
AI produced, AI downloaded. No humans in the loop.
"My wife is a teacher, she used AI to help create an assignment, all the kids used AI to complete it, and now she's using AI to grade it. Nobody learned anything, nobody really did anything. What's happening?"
In that sense AI slop is a symptom, not a disease. But perhaps also a catalyst.
I really wonder if there is a sort of silver lining here, and in the long term low value activities will be filtered out of society. Though that borders on the AI maximalist view which I don't fully agree with.
Of course the glaring question is what value even is.
agree. if internet is so filled with slop. people will move away from it, start to read books, walk, hang out with each other again?
can't move away from internet when you can't earn money without it, and all the services require you to participate
can't read books if no one is going to be publishing those, after they get out-competed by cheap endless slop
no point in walking when cities are built for cars and businesses, and public spaces continue to dwindle and be defunded
can't hang out when you're too tired trying to survive