How Meta Plans To Crank the Dopamine Machine With Infinite AI-Generated Content
Breaking: tech companies have figured out a new way to upend humanity
I still remember when science fiction fans worried about Skynet, HAL 9000, VIKI, or The Matrix. They thought killer robots were humanity's ultimate threat. How many of you have played out that scenario in your mind, strategizing your best moves in case it ever came true? None would have worked but that’s beside the point: killer robots is terrible business. They will never dominate the world because corporations need humans to give them cash. No humans, no money. So, curse those clever money-makers—they went and wrote a completely different end-of-humanity story. One we didn’t see coming: Perfectly customized brain-hacking entertainment.
You may think, “Why is this guy writing about custom entertainment? This isn’t news. TV, the original ‘idiot box’, is a thing of the past and we’re mostly fine! We did not amuse ourselves to death, right?” Right, but you have to remember that AI is also a thing of the past. Wasn’t it invented in 1956? TV is barely 30 years older than that. Both are older than most of you. Why did ChatGPT only happen in 2022? Why did the AI community wait 60 years? I hope you don’t think it’s because they’re altruistic and waited for us to slowly adapt to this revolution through carefully designed waves of iterative deployment.
No, the reason is that ChatGPT couldn’t have existed back then even if the theoretical framework was in place. Other constraints, like fast computers and plenty of web data, were missing. Gradually, and then suddenly, everything comes into place, and BOOM! You’ve got an all-knowing talking computer in your pocket. The same thing will happen with entertainment that can actually kill you out of amusement. Television—not just as a device but even as a concept—was a prototype. A shy first attempt at manufacturing mental numbness. You couldn’t even decide what it showed you—how primitive. Now you have Netflix. You at least choose the movie. But, if you’re a junkie for American shows, you’ve probably already reached the phase where you’ve seen so many that you spend more time scrolling than watching. The fact that nothing can yet fill that leisure gap makes current technology feel prehistoric.
But, what will happen when the shows or the content you scroll through on social media is targeted at you? And I don’t mean that the algorithm knows what you like and then it finds it for you. Netflix already does that. TikTok, which is lowering teenagers’ reading ability below the complexity and length of a Tweet, does it even better. I mean something eerily unique: an AI that can craft, on demand—right there in the moment, like a restaurant à la carte—whatever would best hit your pleasure spots. Something that will keep you glued to the screen, hopelessly hypnotized like a digital puppeteer pulling the strings—and weaving new ones—of your subconscious.
Terrifying. This doesn’t exist yet but might soon. This—and not robots that kill you the standard way—is what science fiction should have warned us about.
Pioneer to all things that matter, Meta has announced a program of generative AI content creators for Facebook and Instagram to allure and retain a younger audience. The Financial Times quotes Connor Hayes, vice president of product for generative AI at Meta, saying that they “expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do. . . . They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform.” Exactly what the younger audience needs.
The idea is not new. Meta tried to turn famous people into bots but, just like your old TV, it was not effective. The company discontinued the feature because only other bots engaged with it (also—and let me use here two specific adjectives to avoid offending anyone—Facebook-prone tech-illiterate boomers, who, in their own way, function like bot swarms). Human users were mocking the attempt from afar, looking at the dystopian sight of bots making cringe posts while other bots cringe-commented on them.
I mock TV in its clumsy, imperfect attempts at being a mind control device (E Unibus Pluram? Perhaps not so much), but bow in respect to TikTok For You feed’s prowess at doing the same thing. A similar leap of progress will happen now. You shouldn’t underestimate what the latest wave of generative AI models is capable of.
Teenagers’ brains are rotten by the hours they spend chatting with Character AI avatars (take a look). Lonely men are desperately leaning on AI girlfriends to cure their incurable illnesses (lack of courage). Even AI-savvy engineers in San Francisco are being one-shotted not by ayahuasca but by Claude Sonnet 3.6. Google wants to try Veo 2 on YouTube to create AI shorts—did you see how impossibly good Veo 2 is? ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, not willing to be left behind, is already “piloting a suite of products called Symphony” to do AI ads (what an amazing combo).
AI can be amazing. AI can be this, too.
So what’s Meta’s goal? Make money. Next question. What’s Meta’s instrumental goal? To keep you more engaged. To sell more ads. Connor Hayes said the new batch of generative AI content creators intends to make Facebook and Instagram “more entertaining and engaging.” More? This declarations compel me to repeat here something I wrote in October 2023 that will only grow in relevance over time: the most important skill you need in the 21st century is learning to be bored. Or, as David Foster Wallace put it, learning to feed “the part of ourselves that likes quiet.”
I gotta give it to them for being so clear about how they plan to screw our brains with their products. It’s not the first time. Sean Parker admitted Facebook was designed to “consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible,” The pro-social aspect of it (”connect with your friends”) was Mark Zuckerberg’s excuse but never a deceitful cover: he’s honest about how determined he is to get what he wants. Aut Zuck aut nihil. Meta’s commitment to pro-sociality has faded so much over time that it’s today an unrecognizable caricature. Instagram is more like, “Do you want to be entertained? I mean, you don’t get to choose because we addicted you a long time ago, so why not be entertained in a customized way?” That’s it. That’s the selling point of the incoming crowd of AI creators.
There’s one seemingly positive takeaway here: Meta says AI-generated content will have to be labeled. If you don’t want it, you can skip it. Sounds great in theory, right? But here’s what happens in reality: first, most people won’t notice the label at first glance; second, they won’t care even if they do; third, they’ll get used to it and eventually forget it’s even there. And fourth—the most critical point—this policy will last only as long as the Overton window demands transparency. Once this strategy becomes the norm, Meta will quietly abandon the pretense of care, just like they disbanded the responsible team once AI ethics lost its appeal to the public.
The beauty of AI, its true value for us humans, lay in what I believed to be an inviolable principle: it’s fine if you choose to use AI, but it’s not fine if AI is forced upon you. Encouraging and pursuing AI-generated content as the default way to build the internet is the tipping point. Once Meta launches this—with the company’s huge reach, influence, and trend-setting power—the world will change. Just like ChatGPT changed the AI landscape. And before it, the iPhone changed how we interact with the internet. And before it, the internet changed how we interact with one another.
Meta is worried, though. How thoughtful of them. (Tech companies claiming to be worried about the very things they create always gets me, as if they truly believed this is a good excuse: “hey, I’m killing you but I tell you because I care for you”). But they’re not even directionally correct with their fake concerns.
They babble about misinformation and the like—which, don’t get me wrong, is a real problem—but that existed before AI. And it’s not like we can care about being misinformed when we’re trapped in a dopamine cycle that keeps us plugged to our damn screens all day. That’s like thinking about your clothes getting dirty as you get swallowed by quicksand. You’ve got bigger priorities—your info diet only matters once you’ve sorted out your brain’s neuroreceptors, your memory, your attention span, your focus, and, well, your ability to go half an hour without your hands instinctively reaching for your fix.
I often hear arguments like, “Why don’t you just log off?” but that’s a ridiculous suggestion. It’s every person for themselves, an individual solution to a collective problem. It’s like responding to climate change with, “Just move somewhere cooler.” We need to confront the root causes and strike at the monster’s heart (Moloch, isn’t it?).
And now I will do some introspection because I might be ranting too harshly against Meta here. Case in point: I love video games. And I love especially video games that I love. This simply means that the more a video game hits my pleasure spots, the more I will love it. When a game developer releases something that floods me with dopamine and leaves me craving the next installment (The Witcher 4, anyone?), I don’t feel resentful, manipulated, or mind-controlled. Though maybe I should. Instead, I feel grateful, impressed by how masterfully they’ve got me hooked.
Why is it different from what Meta is doing here? Is it that social media entertainment is lower quality entertainment than video games? Arguably yes, but that’s a matter of taste and opinion. Is it that AI content feels deceitful? It shouldn’t in this case, they said they’re putting labels. Is it because it’s a new thing and humans have a tendency to resist change they later embrace once it becomes custom? Could be.
But hear me out because I feel there’s a bigger story here: What’s the purpose of life (Doesn’t everything end up there anyway?) No, seriously, The Matrix explored this question in a way that matters here: Do we want to be free agents—whatever that means—of our fate? Do we want to exert our own volition into the world? Or do we want to feel good and not suffer? To be inundated with the most ineffable pleasure those ancient Epicureans couldn’t even dream about? It is not clear to me how to answer these questions like it hasn’t been clear from three thousand years of Western philosophical tradition.
So, depending on how you answer these questions, you should actually be infinitely grateful to Mark and Meta for enacting the beginning of this future where we will lose all of our cognitive functions except the ability to feel pleasure and not feel pain. I know that’s not me, or so I want to believe, but I would understand if it was you.
Not to change topics but you have to notice that History—capital h—is the chaptered story of how the powerful few control the powerless many: tribal quarrels over false gods, slavery, feudalism, financial capitalism, digital numbness—as our awareness grew so grew the sophistication of their methods. But I can also put it this way: Isn’t The Matrix better than being a slave in ancient Greece or a medieval peasant? We would be controlled as we have always been, but at least we get that numbing pleasure from it. One may even claim that Meta never left its pro-sociality nature after all. Or, if one is finally willing to offend, that they’re modern day Jesus Christ.
But perhaps you don’t buy this rhetorical attempt at displaying some epistemic honesty by playing both sides of this argument, and are still set on fighting this apparently inevitable destiny. If so, I’ll admit that you can count on me as your brother-in-arms. I just can’t ignore this terrible fact: AI began as a tool but, as the laws of technological convergence dictate, it has since become a weapon. A weapon of mass distraction.
One so formidable that, in rare moments of clarity when I manage to unplug my brain before sinking back into the noise, I wonder if we’d fare better against killer robots.
Thanks for this, Alberto. I think often in this connection of Neil Postman's foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), to which you've alluded.
If anyone hasn't read it, the foreword is extremely short. Here's a memorable portion:
"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy."
There's a little more to it. Link to the full text here:
https://medium.com/@jaygidwitz/neil-postman-foreword-to-amusing-ourselves-to-death-b548a862b734
Thank you, Alberto. As a father of 2 teenagers, I'm slowly reading "The Anxious Generation" by Jonathan Haidt, seeing social and smartphone effects on my sons, and as a Trainer in AI last year, I met over 2000 teen students to warn them, teachers and families among what will happen with AI.
With a psychiatrist friend, head of a department in my city, I've deeply touched on the long-term effects of this numbness. I can perceive every 'token' of your post not only in what you mean but in the effect the last 20 digital years have had on the younger generation.
I feel incapable of proposing solutions other than regulating or limiting access to these platforms to all ages for a maximum daily amount of time (our epicurean time, perhaps necessary in small daily doses in this complex society), with no apparent solutions for the first time in my life. It's not only a concern vs. Meta but versus the ability of mass to stay 'out of the Matrix.'
We, adults, have a great responsibility, and talking about what's happening is the only short-term solution to deliver something different to the younger generation from the scenario you foresee, which I'm afraid I agree with.
Thank you for your reflections.