Tools that automate community engagement create a feedback loop where AI generates content and then other AI comments on it. This erodes the human value of online communities, leading to a dystopian 'dead internet' scenario where real users disengage completely.
The internet's value stems from an economy of unique human creations. AI-generated content, or "slop," replaces this with low-quality, soulless output, breaking the internet's economic engine. This trend now appears in VC pitches, with founders presenting AI-generated ideas they don't truly understand.
Stack Overflow, a valuable developer community, declined after its knowledge was ingested by ChatGPT. This disincentivized human interaction, killing the community and stopping the creation of new knowledge for AI to train on—a self-defeating cycle for both humans and AI.
One-on-one chatbots act as biased mirrors, creating a narcissistic feedback loop where users interact with a reflection of themselves. Making AIs multiplayer by default (e.g., in a group chat) breaks this loop. The AI must mirror a blend of users, forcing it to become a distinct 'third agent' and fostering healthier interaction.
The proliferation of low-quality, AI-generated content is a structural issue that cannot be solved with better filtering. The ability to generate massive volumes of content with bots will always overwhelm any curation effort, leading to a permanently polluted information ecosystem.
There's a critical distinction in using AI for marketing. Leveraging it to research communities and topics is a powerful efficiency gain. However, outsourcing the final act of content creation and communication to an autonomous agent sacrifices authenticity and is a critical mistake.
Tim Berners-Lee warns that as AI summarizes content and performs tasks for users, people will stop visiting websites directly. This breaks the flow of traffic and ad revenue that sustains countless online publishers and content creators.
A concerning trend is using AI to expand brief thoughts into verbose content, which then forces recipients to use AI to summarize it. This creates a wasteful cycle that amplifies digital noise and exhaustion without adding real value, drowning organizations in synthetic content.
The proliferation of AI agents will erode trust in mainstream social media, rendering it 'dead' for authentic connection. This will drive users toward smaller, intimate spaces where humanity is verifiable. A 'gradient of trust' may emerge, where social graphs are weighted by provable, real-world geofenced interactions, creating a new standard for online identity.
Professionals are using AI to write detailed reports, while their managers use AI to summarize them. This creates a feedback loop where AI generates content for other AIs to consume, with humans acting merely as conduits. This "AI slop" replaces deep thought with inefficient, automated communication.
The value of participating in communities comes from genuine human interaction and building a tribe. Automating comments is not just spam; it misunderstands that marketing's goal is to be remarkable, not just to achieve engagement metrics at scale through robotic activity.