Hi everyone. I am retroactively announcing that Context Rot was off earlier this week because I was in a lovely little part of California called the Santa Ynez Valley. The AI labs were very much not off this week, so there’s lots to cover. Let’s jump in.
New Slop Trough Just Dropped
Meta’s chief AI officer Alexandr Wang posted on X yesterday announcing a new “Vibes” feed in the Meta AI app (don’t worry it’s a good thing if you didn’t know that Meta has a dedicated AI app), which he described as a place for “short-form, AI-generated videos.” I’ve reuploaded the launch video below (Substack can’t embed videos from Tweets), and I can’t guarantee you won’t regret pressing play, but it will give you a pretty good sense of the app’s, well, vibe.
So yeah, that’s a whole feed of slop; a For You fountain of pure unadulterated brain-smoothing meaninglessness. The most charitable description would be TikTok for AI generated video, but that still seems insulting to TikTok, the field of artificial intelligence, and most if not all videos.
The main tech circles on X are usually pretty friendly environs for product launches, but this one quickly turned into a dunkfest, with many accounts comparing Vibes to “the Entertainment” from Infinite Jest and generally asking some form of the question “why did you make this?”
There’s a whole cohort of people on X that will trash any product that dares mention AI (and a whole app named Bluesky that does the same), but even if you’re largely pro-tech and optimistic about new technology—which is how I’d describe myself—I think the question of “who is this for and why should it exist?” does apply here. Meta didn’t even build the AI to generate the content (that’s coming from Midjourney and Black Forest Labs). And Wang himself didn’t seem particularly proud or excited in his announcement—the tone was just a flat “here is this because of course.”
The main criticisms of Vibes essentially fall into two buckets: 1) this looks like shit and is dumb, and 2) this looks like shit and is dumb, but the future less-dumb version of it is very bad for all of us. Let’s unpack them.
Firstly, Vibes is not a good name, but it is fitting—it’s a word that’s been so overused by this point that it’s been stripped of any depth of meaning, no longer representing the ineffable quality of something’s aura or presence, but rather a filler word that belies, and possibly signifies, a failure to convey something actually qualitative or meaningful. Spend some time flicking through the feed in the app, and you’ll experience an animated version of this flatness; the main impression that each video gave me was not a feeling or emotion, but just “yeah, I guess that’s something.” They are images that move. They do not make sense, but they do exist. They were “recommended” by an algorithm, but they have nothing to do with me or anything I have ever been interested in. They are not For Me. Yet they are accompanied by real songs that I’ve heard before, which only adds to the surreality. It’s a bootleg acid trip version of TikTok or Reels, but with a really good music rights lawyer.
So yes, it looks like shit and is dumb. For now. But what if it was really good? The end state here is a fully personalized and on-demand generated feed of infinite videos. And it’s probably very engrossing. It certainly could involve videos made by other humans (or you know, your real friends), but those are expensive, and might not be tailored exactly to what the algorithm thinks will keep your attention. They might also not be as effective at convincing you to buy things (Meta is and will continue to be an ads business). But the bottomless slop machine? That’s Meta’s best shot at building something that can capture a person’s attention and never let it go—the true infinite scroll. It also places complete and total control in the hands of whoever is running the algorithm. Humans have their own little motives and desires when they record a TikTok, but the AI doesn’t (for now). If it’s still unclear, nothing in the app is For You. This is all For Meta. They’ve spent billions on AI, and that needs to be worth something.
So take a few moments to imagine it. Nestled within the gentle waves of your personal slop river, there’s no need for fact checking or independent thought. No need for the friction- and anxiety-riddled experience of saying something to an actual human who may disagree with you. There’s nothing that will trigger you, or ask you to do anything more than click Like or Buy Now. All the reassurance, dopamine, and comfort you could ever ask for is within The Slop. And as the final wrinkles in your brain become smooth and thoughtless, as your last flickers of desire to confront the messy and unpredictable Real World fade into nothingness, can anyone say exactly where you end and the slop begins?
Pulse Check
The Vibes feed wasn’t the only big AI launch yesterday. OpenAI is rolling out something called ChatGPT Pulse, which means the big tech companies went 2/2 this week on mediocre names for seemingly flagship products.
Essentially, Pulse is a daily feed generated by ChatGPT based on what it thinks you’re interested in. The first version seems to be a fairly basic summary of news and bland follow-ups related to what you’ve been talking to ChatGPT about, but OpenAI also teased the ability to integrate with your calendar to give you a heads up about your schedule and help with logistics for things like upcoming trips.
This is most interesting because it switches up the paradigm of how you interact with ChatGPT. Up until now, the AI had to wait for you to ask it something before it could start gleefully spewing tokens at you1, but Pulse allows it to pop into your life without being explicitly prompted. And sure, it only does this once per day in the first version, but it’s easy to see where this leads.
Remember that Poke video, or even the one from Friend? The most compelling idea behind both of those products (and dozens more being ceaselessly deployed to servers by sweaty 996-ers in San Francisco) was the sense of presence they conveyed—the idea that the AI was with you throughout your day, and could proactively talk to you or send you things that it thought was relevant rather than waiting for you to message it. This is where the line between useful assistant and companion starts to really blur, and if done well, ChatGPT has a very good shot at becoming the single “everything” personal AI. (Many many consumer AI startups were trying to build this, and likely died yesterday. RIP.) Much like how the end state of the Vibes feed is a personally generated video slop vortex, the Pulse endgame probably looks like a privately internet generated just for you, with ChatGPT as your guide and curator.
I do think this is a useful product, and I’m surely not the first to point out that this is also a fantastic surface area for ads (“heading to London this week? why not pick up a new Away suitcase for your trip…”). But most importantly, it’s another (big) step in the abstraction layer between us and the internet. I’d never argue that we shouldn’t all spend less time scrolling around online. But letting an AI do the scrolling for us will come at a cost.
Doomscrolls
Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX will control 45% of US TikTok. Somehow the entity is only valued at $14 billion. Trump signed an executive order approving the deal, but ByteDance has yet to acknowledge it.
I really liked this Kyla Scanlon essay on the ways in which our cultural infrastructure for information, knowledge, and attention is failing us. It also includes this banger which sums up pretty much everything: “Attention flows to spectacle, and spectacle rewards the people willing to blow things up rather than build them.”
This NYT story about how the UAE was given the right to purchase high-end AI chips from Nvidia after investing $2 billion in Trump’s crypto company World Liberty Financial is wild.
The Cut has a great (and depressing) story about the growing use of AI in online dating. It’s rough out there: “26 percent of single daters (and nearly half of Gen-Z daters) reported using AI in their dating process, more than a fourfold increase from a year ago.” Every online dating article now is basically “if you’re single you’re ngmi.”
More NYMag: there’s a great profile on the “young workaholics” who are dominating the SF tech world right now. “No one is dating, but everyone is hiring.” I can’t recommend it enough.
Cloudflare is launching a stablecoin designed for online payments by AI agents. There are a lot of buzzwords happening here, but the idea of crypto as the infrastructure layer for AIs to transact with one another is compelling.
Kylie Robison, one of the authors of that viral Friend AI review, was let go by Wired last week. She has a newsletter coming soon.
Now is your chance to get that life-sized dinosaur statue you’ve always wanted.
Keep Your Cards Close to Your Vest
All em dashes inserted organically by me. All typos probably went unnoticed because you got sucked into the Vibes app’s nightmare river of slop and reemerged illiterate.
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