Weekly Scroll: The Internet's Shower Scum
The week in AI gunk, Temu scams, and disappearing TikTok Music
You made it through the week! Congratulations!
If you can’t get enough of me, I appeared on the Bridges podcast - condensed version here and if you’re a real sicko the full 2+ hour version is here. As a treat for getting through the week, here’s your dose of internet nonsense.
AI as Shower Scum
Adweek broke a fairly dark story about Google’s AI efforts this week, reporting that Google is paying small publishers to produce AI generated content. The story is depressing in two ways. As someone who writes and produces content for a living, it’s not super fun to watch AI swallow every media job in existence. Especially when we’ve all read the spammy AI content mills and seen how utterly crap they are.
What’s even worse is that the reported price tag is ‘five figures’ yearly. What a depressingly small bribe. At the rate we’re going we’re going to have maybe five newspapers and eight blogs that survive the onslaught, and God help the rest of us. I need a drink.
In other AI-related news, you’ve probably all seen the pictures of the bizarro dystopian Willy Wonka Experience:
To recap the story very briefly - the organizers of this event advertised the experience as ‘immersive’ and used lush AI generated imagery to advertise what the event would be like. They did not live up to those expectations:
There were reports of children breaking down in tears. People screamed at the organizers. The police were called multiple times over how bad the quality was, and the event had to be shut down. Everyone was offered full refunds. The internet was delighted.
These stories seem unrelated, but they both fit into a broader theme - AI as gunk. I think the best way to describe the role of AI on the social internet right now is that it’s that blockage in your shower made up of hair, scum, dirt and whatever else floated down the drain.
The internet, as we all know, is a series of tubes. Despite being heavily mocked, that analogy isn’t the worst in the world. There’s content out there, and the internet delivers it to you. Via tubes, in this example. These days our internet speeds are so fast that we normally get anything we want as soon as we want it, even if it means we’re downloading a huge file while gaming and also streaming 4K video. We have very large tubes and they deliver us a nearly unlimited amount of internet stuff.
AI fits in this analogy by being the gunk in the tubes, a blockage, the scum in your drain preventing the water from flowing, preventing the internet from delivering good content. For all the wondrous abilities of AI in carefully controlled tests and for all the fun it is to play around with, the average experience of AI on the social internet looks like this:
We’ve talked before about how bad Twitter’s bot problem is getting. We’ve talked about how AI is clogging up Amazon product descriptions and reviews, how it’s being used for celebrity impersonation scams. The common theme here is that AI, in practice, makes it harder to get to the sort of thing you actually care about.
AI blogspam is clogging up Google Search results, making it harder for the real content to flow to you. AI generated descriptions clog up Amazon, making it harder to find useful descriptions of real products. AI bots dominate Twitter replies, making it harder to have real conversations. AI makes it easy to generate buzz for scams, whether that’s a celebrity deepfake selling you crypto or a busted Willy Wonka exhibit. Once again, wasting your time that could have been spent on an actually good experience. Hell, there was a story this week about how restaurants are using AI-generated images to advertise their food on DoorDash and GrubHub.
I try not to be too much of a hater. AI has some clear use cases, and it’s going to keep getting better. It’s not all bad. Hell, I use it here to generate the headline images! Here’s Bing’s Image Creator with its best attempt at ‘unclogging a drain from a PC’
But the defining characteristic of social AI right now isn’t that it actually provides anything we want. It doesn’t delight us, inform us, or do anything notably useful in most cases. The defining feature of AI on the social web is that it’s incredibly cheap to produce nearly unlimited amounts of garbage-tier AI content. And that absolutely garbage content is clogging the tubes of the internet and ruining once-good online experiences.
TikTok keeps losing music
Last month we discussed how TikTok and Universal Music group are having a spat:
The way this works is that TikTok wants users to be able to put popular music in videos, because it’s a crucial feature for the site. Music labels want to make money, and also love viral exposure for their artists. TikTok pays the music label some negotiated amount for the right to use their songs, and everyone’s happy.
But not any more!
Despite protracted negotiations UMG and TikTok couldn’t agree on a payment rate, and UMG used the nuclear option of actually demanding the removal of their music.
At the time, I predicted that the fight would be resolved relatively quickly:
I don’t expect this dispute to last for too long. Music is simply too valuable to TikTok for them to allow the largest record label in the world to pull all their music. A giant amount of their content (and what built their business) is young people doing choreographed dances to songs…
And at the same time, the music industry doesn’t want this to drag out either. TikTok is a viral factory and a star making machine - better at producing breakout cultural hits than the labels themselves. Having your music on TikTok is both an extra revenue stream and the most powerful promotional tool in the world right now. The partnership is too win-win to truly be abandoned. As soon as the parties can get over how buttmad they are and agree on a specific number, the music will be back.
It’s been a month, and despite my prediction the two camps here are digging in and not retreating. The BBC is reporting on how an additional set of UMG music is set to be removed from TikTok. Now it’s not just the music from their artists, but also any song where any UMG artists have a writing credit. The industry seems unclear how expansive that category will be, but it’s millions of songs at minimum. Other estimates range from 30-80% of all music on the platform being impacted.
I continue to think this is a case where a win-win deal can be reached. Both companies stand to benefit from an agreement, but right now they’re fighting over who gets the bigger piece of the pie. With that said, I think the stakes here are fairly low. UMG doesn’t get much revenue from TikTok compared to other social sites, streaming, or direct sales. UMG doesn’t strictly speaking need TikTok, although they certainly benefit when songs go viral there. And TikTok might not need UMG - they haven’t seen much traffic decrease since UMG songs disappeared. This should be win-win, but it’s a small enough win-win that stubbornness might prevail rather than common sense.
DoorDash scam replies
If you’ve been on Twitter recently, you may have seen the following kind posts underneath hit viral tweets:
You might be thinking this is another example of both Twitter’s downfall and AI gunk ruining things. But I’m happy to report some good (?) news - this is a 100% human powered scam!
There have always been people who post schlock underneath popular tweets. Check out my SoundCloud! Follow me, and look at my friends Etsy shop! Etc. There are also people who post ads for unrelated products, where the archetypal example is ‘check out this vibrator’ with an affiliate link. This has been common practice for a while, and for the most part was seen as tacky but not necessarily scammy. After all, the SoundCloud would have actual music - bad music, but it was there. The Esty shop had Etsy stuff. The vibrator was a real vibrator.
The Temu/Doordash scam is a bit different, because there’s no actual product. You will be shocked to learn that DoorDash is not actually partnering with Temu and there is no free $50. But then what’s going on?
I took the simple step of DMing a few of these accounts to ask what happened, and they told me how the whole thing works:
Another poster:
Based on my conversations, this scam appears to be operated by actual humans, who manually search for viral tweets and pay between $30-150 total for the poster to post the Temu scam underneath. It’s also broader than just using DoorDash - they target a lot of different communities and also post on Facebook and TikTok. They might promise Minecraft or Roblox in-game currency, Taylor Swift swag, etc.
But what’s the actual scam? Referrals. The code you enter on the Temu app doesn’t steal anything from you or really hurt you in any way. But it counts as a referral for the for the scammer’s Temu account, and anything you buy afterwards they’ll be rewarded for. They also can profit purely from referring a huge number of people, as Temu is heavily gamified and incentivizes this kind of behavior.
Keep your chin up, humanity. We’re still capable of producing annoying spam just like the AIs.
Links
Fanfiction drama! Some enterprising souls are taking popular fanfictions and selling unauthorized printed copies on Etsy. Those wacky fanfiction kids, I tell myself, as I try to convince myself that the web serials I obsessively read are totally not the same thing.
The latest in ‘governments try to ban the entire concept of encryption’ is Nevada’s state government, which asks a court to do just that. As always Mike Masnick’s Techdirt is doing God’s work documenting these idiots.
Have you ever thought ‘What if we had TikTok, but none of the cool viral content, just the dead-eyed people hawking brands’? You’re in luck!
Jack Teixeira, the discord leaker discussed in the classic Infinite Scroll post The One Ring of Posting, will plead guilty to leaking classified documents.
What happens when body positivity influencers start taking Ozempic?
Study finds that stable pseudonyms create the best comment sections, better than free-for-all anonymity and real names.
Threads continues to have far more momentum as a Twitter replacement than BlueSky.
Posts
As always thanks for reading! I appreciate you gremlins quite a lot. If you’re able, consider subscribing or upgrading.
“ The defining feature of AI on the social web is that it’s incredibly cheap to produce nearly unlimited amounts of garbage-tier AI content. And that absolutely garbage content is clogging the tubes of the internet and ruining once-good online experiences.”
Right, none of this is new. There’s always been scummy bullshit content on the internet. It’s the *volume* and the speed with which that volume has arrived. Like if you woke up one morning and the layer of scum that used to be a thin film on the drain of your shower yesterday was suddenly caked a foot thick on every surface of your bathroom.
On a more serious note-- weirdly it's pretty cool you're just able to DM the scammers (or well, the scammers' underlings) and be able to figure out how much they're paid to do this.
Also, on the Huffington Post "pseudonym" thing, an important thing to note is that the existence of forums and subforums complicates the topic. I have a "durable pseudonym" on r/badeconomics because I comment decently enough and there aren't a huge amount of users in the FIAT thread. It seems pretty similar to their "second phase" where I have a persona that is costly to drop. However, in pretty much every other subreddit (save maybe some soccer ones), I might as well have a random pseudonym, especially in bigger subreddits. This delineation also probably explains why smaller subreddits are less toxic on average than bigger ones, though obviously there are other factors at work here (ex. https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths).