Last week I wrote about how deeply unpopular AI, data centers, and the oligarchs behind them are. At the tail end of that piece, I touched on media consolidation and showed examples of the ways our tech overlords are reshaping our information environment to their own benefit and profit.

If you haven't read it, selfishly I think it's one of the better recent editions of the newsletter. It establishes a framework and set of assumptions that I'm going to operate under today.

My operating premise last week was that nobody wants this AI stuff. My argument today has morphed a bit: yes, some people do want it, enough to make it profitable. Fine. But the use case described below is awful and should be launched into the sea.

Before I get there, some context.

From at least the time of its acquisition by Facebook (now Meta), I've had an uncomfortable relationship with Instagram. I have installed, uninstalled, and reinstalled the app more times than I can count.

It’s a textbook example of enshittification, perhaps the defining term of our times. What started as a fun photo sharing app has ballooned, stealing features from its challengers, along the way morphing into a primary means through which unassuming people are fed AI content. Ten years ago, Instagram snatched the most popular feature from Snapchat, Stories, posts that auto delete after 24 hours. Four years later they dove into short form video, stealing the primary feature from TikTok, renaming the videos Reels. No one really uses the photo sharing feature anymore and if you do post one, no one will see it because they’re deprioritized in the company’s algorithm. 

The result is a behemoth of time wasting and I feel dirty each time I use it for more than a few minutes. But at the same time Instagram is the preferred social media network for many of my peeps back home and so after deleting, sometimes for as long as a year, I inevitably find myself back on the damn app. 

In my current go-round I have the Reels algorithm housebroken to feed me three things: stand up comedy, magic and card tricks, and soccer highlights. I know that reads like a junkie defending their drug habit… “Nah, it's not like that. I only do cocaine on the weekends.” But it’s how I manage the mania.

This morning I came across a video in which a stand-up comedian, George Brett Olson, was complaining about his jokes being stolen. This is not a new complaint among comics. Notably “comedian” Joe Rogan and Carlos Mencia got into a row about joke theft in 2020;  the latter hasn’t had much of a career since.

But this bit of larceny is different. 

Olson posted a video showing both him and the offending party, Tiffany Sloan, doing the setup and delivering the punchline. The plot twist is that Sloan is all AI. In the video you can see Sloan, an ostensibly attractive “woman” with, for lack of a better term, a large posterior. This is often part of the hook with AI generated engagement accounts. For instance, there's an AI generated golf influencer named "Gracie" out there that I have blocked with the same trademark “backyard situation.”

In the video Sloan is wearing the same colored outfit as Olson, “hers” more revealing, doing the same gestures, delivering the same joke. Olson then explains that the AI account had not only stolen his joke, but had stolen from dozens of other comedians, amassing a following of 300,000 people along the way. The crime here?  The anonymous creators of Sloan are now monetizing the content they steal from others. Thanks to the incentives created by Instagram's parent company, Meta, it is profitable to do this. Their business model pays creators on a per view basis once they have built a following, for bringing and keeping people on the platform.

Olson also mentioned that other versions of this same AI joke stealing "woman" exist in other ethnicities on Instagram and on adult platforms. No, I won't be linking to those, but as you might have guessed it rhymes with Fonly Pans.

So to be clear: a working comedian had his joke stolen by an anonymous person who created a big-butted hot girl AI avatar, which then stole his jokes and dozens of others', monetized the theft, ran an adult content side hustle, and somehow managed to violate none of Meta's terms of service.

That may be both the longest and dumbest sentence I've written in the history of the newsletter. And for what? There is absolutely no societal benefit to any of this. We are burning fresh water so dudes can gawk at AI generated butts.

Listen, I'm not an AI rejectionist. There are clearly useful applications for the technology, especially when it comes to sorting through large data sets and programming. But this ain't it. This is a plagiarism machine that is stealing jokes and doing adult content. And somewhere out there, right now, someone is watching one of those stolen joke videos. Someone is watching AI generated adult content. It's giving the ick just writing about it.

Last week I borrowed the exasperated refrain “Nobody Wants This.” But honestly, that misses the mark. Clearly, enough people do want it to make it not just profitable but lucrative.

The technology didn't do this. Meta's incentive structure did. Pay for engagement, and you get engagement. Steal a joke, generate a hot AI avatar, post it, watch the views roll in. The algorithm doesn't care where the content comes from. It only cares that you watch.

And you do. We do. Some of us, anyway. Enough of us to make it lucrative. That's the part that makes me go “ick.”