AI Content and the War for Your Attention

0:00Humans who are able to be creative and use AI tools correctly will have superpowers. Does AI so ruthlessly optimize for that former, what you will pay attention to, it totally alienates you from the latter once you want to pay attention to? Acquisition and retention are different things, right? It's amazing how sort of bad, schlocky and ineffective most internet advertising is. I would literally bet large portions of my net worth in time. That's the future. That's going to be the gig. AI is going to upstream everything about consumer experience. We're in the midst of an apoccal transformation in how we get energy and it's just not that sexy.

0:40We're now all going to be famous for 15 minutes. We're all going to be famous to 50 people. Fifteen people, yeah. In a world where everyone is famous to 15 people, what happens when AI starts generating content for all of them? In this episode, I've joined by author and MSNBC host Chris Hayes and longtime ad tech operator and writer Antonio Garcia Martinez to talk about the shifting economics of attention. How we got here, what's breaking, and what AI might make worse. Chris's new book, The Sirens Call, is about the way our attention has been bought, sold, and overwhelmed. Together, we explore the rise of AI Slop, whether platforms can contain it, and what comes next as digital content, fame, and identity get increasingly fragmented.

1:22Let's get into it.

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1:57So excited to have you on Chris. Antonio is a long time friend and collaborator of mine. We have a show. Well, Antonio, why don't you briefly introduce yourself? Yeah, I started an ad tech, I guess in 2008, in attention capitalism, as Chris would call it and worth the number of startups. I was an early member of the Facebook ads team back before the IPO when the ad system was horrible for those old enough to remember. I suspect Chris is probably in the same bucket. Facebook ads used to be these little coastage stamps on the right hand side. and then they became this huge money machine. Written a book about that time called Cast Monkeys that came out to us.

2:27I've read it. I've read it. Well, yeah, yeah. I'm quoted in the book was a media figure writer guy for a while. I don't know how you do a Chris. It drove me basically crazy. And so I went back to tech and I'm not about that. Antonio famously says the prize for beating Madaglaysias in the sub stack rankings is you then become Madaglaysias and that wasn't inspiring enough. I'm not anti -matte, but we were briefly among the top 10 or 15 set staffers on a revenue basis, circa like 2021, and he was definitely a cop, I guess. Tim and Andrew Solomon were definitely the winners of that race. I feel like I would probably have more to learn from you guys than you have from me.

3:03So I'm happy to talk and maybe I'll ask you some questions. I sort of think like the whole thing is about to collapse. I think there's just a huge pollution problem. And I think that the treatment of spam in the book is the sort of signature pollution of attention capitalism of the attention age. if it's lucrative to aggregate lots of attention, where attention pools and collects, there will be money, and to the extent that you can cheaply automate the extraction of that attention, even if it's done in a sort of like brute force wasteful way, there's gonna be spam, right? So it's happened in junk mail, it's happened on phone calls, it's happened on tax, it's happened on email, But I think the idea of AI content creation now puts that at scale for all the social media platforms.

3:56And I guess the question becomes like, is the AI social media content generated actually compelling enough that it doesn't feel like spam and it just dislocates all human creators? Do people not like it? So the algorithm stops serving it up or does it overwhelm the experience in a is feel is AI slop going to win. Yeah, that's what I have say like is AI slop going to win? I mean, yes and no, I mean, you're seeing it in the four you top Twitter already, right? And maybe I would think this because I was creator paid for my creations. I guess it's a Sunday grade, but I think a lot of it is empty and sterile.

4:30And I think humans who able to be creative and use AI tools correctly will have superpowers. Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty obsessed right now with AI slop and particularly like these sort of sub genres that feel like what's funny about a lot of AI is that it doesn't actually feel that sophisticated. It just feels like reverse engineered in a way that you can trace. I mean, not all of it, right? But some of it does. There are moments we all have with this technology where we're like, oh my god. But like, for instance, it's clear that like religious themes and babies like do well, right? And so there's this whole like universe of AI baby singing, blessed Lord on my soul.

5:06And there's one I saw yesterday that's like Jesus with a baby. They're both singing blessed Lord on my soul. And Jesus is holding a disembodied foot, which is just like signature AI slop. To me, the sort of question about all this stuff is, one of the theses of the book is that there's this kind of disconnect between what we will pay attention to and in some volitional sense, what we want to pay attention to. And the question is, does AI, from the generative perspective and AI from the machine learning algorithmic perspective so ruthlessly optimized for that former, what you will pay attention to, it totally alienates you from the ladder, which you want to pay attention to.

5:46And if it does do that, do people stick with it or do they reach some point where they feel too alienated from what they want to be spending their time doing? Well, I think the challenge there is what you put Chris, which by the way, I think it's time you just plug Chris's book. I think you were a phenomenal book actually. Well, thanks. And I would recommend it to all my tech people. One of the things you cite is the to use the marketing, speak acquisition and retention or different things, right? It's one thing to acquire at that time. I think you said the example of someone going into a room and firing a gun in the air, well, you've acquired attention.

6:14But then how do you maintain it? And even with the guy with the gun in his hand, I'm up your little heart to maintain it. Right? And that's the challenge. And if you're a sophisticated marker, you realize it's not just about acquisition, it's about the retention side of it. I don't know. A positive side of me, things humans aren't going to sit there and stare at the slopal day. That said, I've used TikTok and like a meth head, like getting into a fenty fold on the street. Like I emerged two hours later, or I come to you and what the hell just happened. And then I delete the app from my phone because I never want to do that again.

6:39Yeah. So that's maybe the kind of argument. Well, first of all, thanks for the kind words I appreciate. Especially because I'm not a practitioner and ad tech and so much of the story is sort of an ad tech story. I mean, I think deeper than ad tech, ad tech is sort of epiphenomenal to the story. So it's really gratifying to hear that from someone who's worked in it. And yeah, like I've had the exact same experience. Again, the sort of defining metaphor of the book, like the sirens call Odysseus on the mast, sort of trying to avoid the sirens with your sort of volitional conscious self against the kind of lulling that happens, right?

7:11And all of us in that position. But I'm just really, yeah, I think I have the same faith as you that fundamentally there's something irreducibly human and that people are gonna just rebel. Basically, we'll rebel against Slop, which I think brings us back to this first question, which I do think is really interesting, which is if the Slop overruns it, what does that mean for the platforms? And is it something that they have to start actively managing in the same way that at scale, somewhere like Twitter, right, they started to have to deal with a bunch of really difficult content moderation questions that were tough calls, where they're trying to create a user experience that is not going to repel people and is going to attract advertisers.

7:54And I do wonder if AI generated content becomes a set of questions like that for TikTok and for for reals and stuff like that is certain point. We've had a slot problem before AI, right? I mentioned LinkedIn earlier in terms of how fake that network feels, but also an Instagram, right? Like, people have fenced as fake Instagrams for a reason. So this idea of who you present yourself as and who you actually are, what you actually think has been a problem with social networks for a while. And it's not obvious to me that AI will make the problem worse in terms of accelerating or emphasizing either fake stuff or stuff that people don't want to be engaging with.

8:32Why are you so convinced that it will expand that gap between what we want to be engaging with and what we actually engage with? I just think to me it's sort of a quantity and automation question. Like one of the things about online success is that it's not a batting average. It's like your total number of hits. I mean, it's a batting average if you're like trying to make a living, right? And you only have so much time. But Mr. B's talks about this. Other people talk about it too. like it always be posting and see what works. And sometimes you can post the same things 15 times and one time it takes off and other times it doesn't.

9:01If you're thinking about it as this quantity game, right? And this is where the sort of brute force spam analogy comes in. If you're automating 1 ,000 views every day and just throwing them at the algorithm for sort of content farming purposes, does that start to overwhelm everything? Because you can just do, I can't make 1 ,000 videos a day. But, you know, you can now, right? And Antonio, to your point, like, you could even imagine this not as like a slop spam thing. You could imagine it as someone who's actually pretty good, right? Using that automation. It's just to me the kind of brute force scale issue.

9:35Maybe it never comes up, but it just seems to me like I'm starting to see it crop up. And just wonder what it's going to do to the existing models for these platforms. What I think I find interesting about the impact of social media. I mean, you cite a lot of the negative impacts of social media. And you cite one book, The Friendsy of Renown, that I actually started reading based on your recommendation, actually. It's a great book, isn't it? I'm gonna be that guy. So I think I have a line of cows, monkeys that says Andy Warhol was wrong. In the future, we're now all gonna be famous for 15 minutes.

10:00We're all gonna be famous to 15 people. 15 people, yeah. It's a great line. Yeah, and the fact that everyone carries themselves, like they are a Kardashian, every way they go. I mean, just as like a tourist in Europe, the fact that literally you have a line of people taking selfies in front of the thing, right? is already like, people are imagining themselves already under the spotlight. And as a side thing, like yesterday, I work at a tech company, it's very young. And I think the one thing the Zoomers themselves cited is that like, well, you feel like you're being observed all the time, right?

10:27Everyone is like a celebrity who goes out in the wild. And if you yell at a waiter, who you do something stupid, which we've all done by the way, right? Suddenly, you can become into famous for it and nobody wants that. And I just, again, Chris and I are probably all enough to remember that before times, when we were young dumb kids, if you didn't go to jail and didn't go to the hospital, it didn't happen, right? It was God. I mean, maybe remains as like local lore, but it never got bigger than that. You weren't really worried about anything, right? And somehow that's totally changed the way that people think about themselves.

10:57Yeah, and I think one of the things I write about in the book a lot is sort of the effects of sort of the attention and social attention on you and what it does and that democratization of fame as a genuinely new phenomenon that's sort of different from past eras. And I think you're right, like it is behavior modifying. And for me, I have the experience of actually, again, fame is always totally relative, different people are famous in different places, but like, you know, people recognize me on the street. I do have that awareness that for instance, if I like screamed at a car that cut me off, you know, or like, oh, most hit me as it was around in the corner, and like people might know that was me and associating me.

11:32So there is that kind of behavioral modification part of it, too. But there's also something profoundly warping about it psychologically. And I think it is true that that point that you just made, though is a really interesting one. There is some kind of pro social effect, right? Of like, you're not wanting to be like a complete maniac in public because that might go viral or something. Is it interesting pro social aspect of it? But I also think there's something so warping about it. And one of the things that, and I quote this in the book, the move from public posting to group chat is I think 100 % driven by that, right?

12:03So more and more of all the traffic and Instagram talks about this all the time is happening in private messaging. things are happening in private Facebook groups, signal chats, WhatsApp chats, like sort of try to re, basically to kind of reclaim a private space that's not public space, is one of the sort of bigger trends happening. I think precisely because of how warping and disquieting it is to be in this kind of digital panopticon and the subject of near -constant total surveillance and social attention. You're totally correct, and I want to get back to the group chat things. I think at the end of your book, you become a little bit of a Doomer Chris.

12:38But you start trying to cite solutions to the problem. And I think the group chat, one is an interesting one, but I wanna focus on one thing you said, which is, is a pro -social, right? And one of the things I noticed, right after I wrote the outsmokies, I lived, I kid you not on a small island in Northwest in what's called the San Juan's, which is these beautiful islands. Yeah, I've been there, it's beautiful. Yeah, it's very small town. And so the reality is everyone's famous in that neighborhood and that everyone knows who everyone is and their family. And so if you did something totally crazy and like off the bend, And you'd still catch how for it to be cool.

13:06Like you wouldn't get away with it. And so a lot of our focus on privacy. In fact, this is historically trying, this is a bit of a rabbit hole. I don't know if we want to go down there. But you look at the history of privacy. And I can Chris and Tree study topics. Louis Brandas basically created in 1890 with this sort of discosition called the right to privacy that he more or less invented, by the way. The word privacy doesn't appear once in the constitution. And the reason why is, because at the time, it wasn't used in the sense that we mean it, which is the right to live as a stranger among strangers.

13:29Which again, it was a right that was more or less invented to cope with like urban living where we're losing this ability to actually know every bite. And anyhow, long wind up to getting to, I think the group chat phenomenon, not everybody can join the group chat. There's an admin, right? If someone gets completely out of control, they get booted. And then everyone kind of knows everyone. So like, you don't really want to piss people off because there's typically some theme, at least in my group chats, often professional, right? Like I'm in a group chat with Eric and we're a lot of people that have worked together and invested into those companies.

13:54You can't be that much of a dick to be blunt because you'll take a hit for it, right? So it's self -regulating. And I think, to me, if I was to propose a solution to our current bind. It's not less technology and like I read like a put layer in jihad against this thing. I think it's using technology in some way to recreate. I totally agree with that. I mean, I do think the scale ends up being really the problem. I mean, the question to me is like where is the revenue in that model? And this is sort of the interesting question, right? This is something I'm really obsessed with. And it's the germ of something that I explored in the book I'm writing about now in relation to AI, but like we tend to conflate particularly this era like useful tech and lucrative tech.

14:35And those are not like there's technologies that are incredibly useful that are not particularly lucrative like penicillin right now like antibiotics, you know, is making enormous fortunes off them. Even solar power, which is arguably the most useful technology of our age, is a perfectly profitable enterprise, but no one's making like like Rockefeller fortunes, off the solar right now. And then there's technologies that are incredibly lucrative but not particularly socially useful. Like the fan dual trafficking tech is like really good tech. Like it works really well, but it's not like particularly useful, particularly compared to penicillin.

15:13And one of the things I think that ends up happening in a digital space that is so dominated only by commercial options is you don't get as much useful tech that might not have a great business revenue or a business model. And so this question of, well, what's right? So what's the sort of sustaining business model of the group chat? Is an interesting one. Now, obviously, what's app which meta -owns is incredibly valuable company? I mean, incredibly valuable division of meta. There's signal, which is fascinating because it is a nonprofit and I think a really interesting model in that respect. But to your point, I totally agree about this sort of reclaiming kind of community or reclaiming like dumb bar numbers or IRL reactions or what I say in the book is that normal relationships are born of bilateral exchanges of social attention, right?

16:03As opposed to unilateral, right? That's the way we're all conditioned to work. And the question is, it's not a particularly lucrative tech to reclaim. And that to me is the question of, is there some fundamental tension here between what the sort of revenue model incentives are and what the tech is best for us as people or whatever. I mean, one take on that Chris, I mean, just to give you the view from the crypto trenches because I work at a crypto company, group chats are actually huge in the crypto space, and usually on Telegram, which is an app that most people don't use, or most Americans use certainly.

16:35And there you actually either pay to enter the group chat or some apps have actually literally tokenized being able to go into the group chat, see if they buy so many of the token. And then the owner of the group chat was the guy who was leaking the alpha because this is all very speculative, right? The token represents his value. There's a company called Front Tech, that was short -lived. I was part of it for a while, and I had a channel and you could buy the DAGM token, and you could join the group as part of it. But I think the lesson there is that if you overfinancialize things, it loses the social side of it.

17:02The crypto does a lot, right? AI is everything is computer, and crypto everything, money, like really everything. But yeah, I agree with you. I mean, one place I'd maybe queble with you a little bit, or I guess I don't know, I'm confused myself. I think the world we're heading to, the digital version of things is like the mainstream, premium economy version of the world. And then I think our friend, Mark and Jason, that you might know Eric, his is the A and the scientific had you famously said that some people are in reality privileged, right? Some people are wealthy and out for living a certain context in which they don't need the VR headset, right?

17:30Cause like their life's good enough that I need it, but everyone else gets the VR headset. And so how do you strike that balance between the digital versus the real versions of it? But I think what happens is, and again, I think it's the subtext to your entire book, Chris. Who we interact with, who we agree with is completely uncoupled from our actual physical place in the world. And I think that tension between the physical and I wouldn't say spiritual necessarily, but intellectual is that the heart of all, I think the nation state is cracking up in a way to see get humor for a second. And I think the internet's definitely behind part of it, because you don't have the sense of collective consensus that the media and TV, for example, used to create during the Cronkite era.

18:04Used to have some level of synchrony or synergy that would happen with Cronkite saying, and that's the way it is. And somehow now I scroll my feed versus Blue Sky. and it's like, no, I don't know what the way it is actually. It's not completely the other way it is. What's really interesting too is to think about it from it being the opposite problem because so much of what happens in sort of the 20s and 30s particularly when you have sort of huge mass, mass broadcast mediums that can sort of capture attention at scale, right? Is that you have sort of this opposite problem, right? Which is like the problem of the mass media and this is something that Lippmann encounters when he has a job basically propagandizing for entrance into World War One, which is that, whoa, this is an insanely powerful tool.

18:47And you can blast out messages at scale to all these people and get them all thinking the same way or moving the needle in some way. And that was a problem that Lipman wrestles with and all sorts of different folks wrestle with. And now we have the opposite problem, right? There is no getting anything like that. I mean, I've even come to feel one way to think about a public is paying attention to the same thing together. And I've even come to feel like weirdly old man nostalgic for the Super Bowl or when everyone's talking about love island because it feels like, oh, here's a thing that everyone is paying.

19:25I'm not watching love island, but I know that everyone is. And I find some weird comfort in that. I mean, I think it's so funny because I think 20 or 30 years ago this was so particularly if you're Jen Axe and you thought to yourself the sort of alternative in whatever way that like that was stultifying, mass, culture, and middle brow. But I've come to miss that because I think it's the thing we're sort of missing, which is everyone. Football's really the only thing left. This sort of everyone pays attention to together. The elections. Yeah, and elections, although we pay attention in such different ways, but I do think there's something, yeah, there's something lost in that.

20:01And I don't know how to get it back right. And I'm also fully aware it might just be like, I'm 46 and I'm just succumbing to the nostalgia of middle age. What was the last sort of like literary event that like every American paid a tattoo? And my vote is for like Jonathan Frank since the corrections that came out. I was literally going to say, France and the corrections and then like the whole whole way. The whole thing. Right. Everyone had, it's a great book by the way. I like France as a writer. Everyone had to read that damn book. And since then, it's never been the case that everyone's read the same book at all.

20:30Yeah. I mean, with the possible ex -Effrono David Foster Wallace and Infinite Jazz, but it's one I know those books, everyone claims to read, but no, it's actually read. I think people actually did read the corrections. And yeah, it's weird because if you talk to like Gen Xers and particularly I think people like again, Mark who came from maybe not like poor mainstream America, but they always say about the internet and it's like, oh, I finally found my people. Like I was interested in, some weird little niche obsession that in your little Midwestern town, there's nobody doing it. Although, what's also interesting to me too, and I'm always curious about the tech, I feel like I don't have a great sense actually and maybe you guys have a better sense of this.

21:02I think A, it's very funny we refer to the algorithm as like a definite article, like it's sort of to a temic or almost like a deity, like the algorithm served me this. And it's always just unclear to me like how sophisticated the algorithm actually is. Sometimes it just seems very dumb to me where I look at one thing and then it serves me 15 of that. And it's like, I probably could have coded that. That's a that impressive. It's not like that sophisticated. Sometimes it does find things where I'm like, oh, wow, There's something interesting happening here. I write about the book, like taking a gummy and like realizing that it's just showing me pictures of sandwiches and after like 30 minutes of just like, it's like, oh, it knows that I'm high.

21:40Like that's a kind of magic. One of the things I think is interesting is there will be these kinds of things that go viral or have this kind of like allure, that resonance that everyone is then talking about or everyone does, particularly in Gen Z, like reference or even the way that people talk like this sort of brain rot Gen Z way of talking is really interesting to me because that does seem recognizably mass, right? In the same way the 1960s, it was like far out and groovy and all these things that like there is this really distinct argot of Gen Z, but they're getting it all not from mass culture, but from basically algorithmic social media.