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Not really culture war for the main thread nor a small-scale question, but nonetheless:
I predict we are shortly going to see platforms using generative AI + A/B testing to make "hyperslop".
Imagine a music service, or a TikTok-like platform with AI-generated shortform videos. The generator gets hooked up to an optimiser which tweaks its input parameters. These could be legible, such as "colour saturation", "cuteness", or "content variability", or entirely opaque weights somewhere. If a tweak is statistically established to increase engagement, it is applied and another A/B test begins.
You could even have specific optimisers which gets run on various subgroups, like "female American teens 16-18" gets their own sub-optimiser, as well as every subculture and every little attractor basin you can identify. This could go all the way down to tweaks for each individual user if content is cheap enough to be personalised.
All the prerequisites for this already exist. We've already gotten a taste of it from YouTube thumbnails, which have been A/B gradient-descended for years on the minds of a billion of mostly children to plaster those inhuman staring open-mouthed faces everywhere. It's just a matter of time before bulk AI generation gets cheap enough to speed it up thousands of times and apply it to the content itself.
From what I can tell, Spotify is already doing this. I don't have a Spotify account.
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Yes, but as you mention we've been doing it for years. There's a ceiling to the effect you're going to get. There's only so much sugar you can put into cereal; only so much salt on potato chips; you can only get so high, so drunk, so sedated.
And those are all direct chemical effects; Dopamine hits are mediated. Look, screen addiction is already bad yes, and I think it will get marginally worse, but only so much directly from AI hyperstimuli, and groups of people will be hit differently. There's not some magical 'infinity-slop' that will eventually scratch everyone's itch.
A lot of screen addiction is a loop that comes from atrophied real world satisfaction. I'm at my worst with phone scrolling when 1. There's a lot of built up stress in my outside life, and 2. I enter habit-forming patterns of de-stressing. The habit is from the 'unplugging', and the stimulus only needs to be enough to keep the habit up.
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