The Bull Case for AI Content on UGC Platforms

Yesterday, Ben Thompson interviewed Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters. I don’t cover Netflix, but this particular bit on “AI Slop” caught my attention:

Ben Thompson: Is AI slop going to save you? If it overwhelms the UGC platforms and basically it’s like you’re a refuge, so this is all actual, real.

Greg Peters: I think it’s a credible — I don’t know if that’s the reality so I can’t say with certainty that’s where we’re going to land, but it’s a credible possibility, I think.

Ben Thompson is basically alluding to the idea that abundance of AI content creates noise that can overwhelm the system. I understand the intuitive appeal of the argument because I myself did fall for it once. Back in late 2023 when I decided to sell Alphabet, I was worried that “AI Slop” may overwhelm the open web, making Google Search increasingly unreliable. The problem is I severely underestimated how spamming has been an endemic challenge in search from the early days of web and it is literally Google’s job to differentiate spamming from actual, high quality information. If two decades of sifting information in the internet doesn’t equip them to be prepared for AI generated low quality content, it is hard to see any other company who could do this job any better. Similarly, we already have infinite content, and multiplying infinite human generated content by infinite AI slop gets you…well, infinite total content. The primary “job to do” for the algorithm of UGC (User Generated Content) platforms has been to surface the content you or I personally will find intriguing. So, the core job isn’t really changing at all although the volume is likely going to accelerate.

While I intuitively rejected this hypothesis that AI generated content may be bad for UGC platforms, even I underestimated some of the potential upsides these platforms may enjoy due to AI content. I will discuss a couple of papers behind the paywall which highlight such upsides.

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