We are destroying ourselves; the very core of what it is to be human. I say this acknowledging the irony of writing this on my phone, on a Sunday morning, when I should be engaging with the real world and people in my life.

Television was rightly criticised for being the opiate of the masses; a continuous stream of entertainment that allows you to ‘stop thinking’ to endure boredom. However it had some constraints. The box was in a fixed space, I could not bring it with me. The content was fixed, it could not always engage me.

Social media, and every other ‘content delivery’ system is not like this. It is in my pocket, there is so much content, it can keep me continually engaged. AI content generation optimises this, perhaps, but we already live in this dystopia.

Rise up and revolt! Put down our phones and refuse to engage! Our very lives, our humanity depends on it!

We’ve started instituting a “no phones” policy when the kids have sleepovers to try to combat this at least a little bit, and have constant conversations about why things like Instagram are toxic and we should just try to spend our time enjoying life.

Obviously I’m also posting here while I wait in the car waiting to pick someone up, but I actively make an effort to unplug on a regular basis.

Maybe what I need is an AI agent to consume AI generated content on my behalf.

Then I can continue with my strong preference to direct my time and attention toward content generated, mostly, by my fellow humans.

Once you see social media as an attention-extraction machine rather than a communication system, outsourcing creation to users starts to look like a temporary optimization, not the end state

If the final step is then just AI watching their own AI-created content then I'm okay with it.

> is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume? I think Facebook is heading this direction.

Platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts have already gone a long way down that path. I don't think users like this content much though.

I think in 12 months we're not going to know the difference unless we put in some serious effort. I use AI quite a lot and it's great, but don't like it for 'media' in general. Personally, I don't want to support AI generated audio, video, or text content. This past week I came across an Instagram account, found it interesting and followed it. Admittedly it was some high-level cookie cutter self-help stuff. Easy to catch your attention. Eventually I dug into it a bit more and it was 100% AI generated. I'd missed it completely and there were no comments suggesting it was AI content either despite over 1m followers. If you want to be sure the media you are viewing is actually created by real people, algorithmic feeds are no longer an option. It will be interesting to see over the next year or two whether there is a large backlash and people start seeking out content they are positive is created by real people, or if that becomes a subculture and the masses are happy with their circus.

Meta has already introduced a dedicated app for exactly this: https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/25/meta-launches-vibes-a-shor...

Yes.

> Taking this analogy further, is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume?

The singular purpose of social media has always been advertising. That 100% depends on the ability of platforms to control the message, which Facebook achieved to an extent that politicians started paying them in order to game elections.

Then "influencers" came, and largely control the message on essentially all platforms.

By contrast, on Youtube and Twitter, advertisers are making deals directly with specific influencers so their advertising remains on-target. Only "old-style" generic geo-targeted advertising, what you used to see on TV, uses the platforms themselves.

AI achieves many things for these platforms:

1) get rid of influencers by creating AI influencers (done both by influencers themselves, attempting to create fake/AI influencers that are cheaper, and by the platforms that want to control the process)

2) allow advertisers to control the message (think of a guarantee not to get shown on pro-Nazi channels)

3) force advertisers to come to the platforms instead of specific influencers

4) also get the ability to influence and later even control elections