It is 10 pm. You are horizontal, phone above your face, thumb on autopilot. A child presents an impossibly elaborate cake captioned as their first try. Swipe. A sea creature that should not exist. Swipe. An elderly stranger rendered by a model, asking you to wish them happy birthday. With every hollow flash, memory of a quieter internet flickers and fades. That feeling of being tricked into a dissociative scroll has a name: enshittification — what happens when a platform built to share your stories quietly becomes a machine for extracting your attention instead.
The three-stage decay, now at stage three
Writer Cory Doctorow coined the term for a pattern he kept watching: platforms are first genuinely good to users, then degrade the user experience to please advertisers, then degrade everyone — advertisers included — to squeeze returns before the exit. Every social network you once loved and slowly stopped loving ran this loop. What the feed is experiencing now is the same process reaching the content layer itself, and generative AI is why it is happening at this speed and scale.
The incentive is no longer to show you anything meaningful; it is to keep you scrolling one more second, because one more second is one more ad impression. And the cheapest way to fill that second at industrial volume is slop: content mass-produced by individuals or tiny operations, aimed at high-payout ad programs, published in volumes no human schedule could reach. One Kenyan creator described to New York Magazine how he prompted a chatbot to write engagement-farming captions, fed them to an image generator, and repeated the loop indefinitely. A 22-year-old Indian medical student told WIRED he earns thousands a month running an AI influencer persona in under an hour a day. None of this is made for you. It is made on you — and the feed rots a little more each time it works.
Why slop stops the scroll but never earns it
The bizarre thumbnail works by ambush, not by merit. You look because you cannot believe you are looking, not because a story is being told. The quality is visibly low, the artificiality is obvious, and everyone knows it. Shock is a one-time transaction: it arrests attention for a second and returns you to the same hollow feeling you were scrolling away from. No resonance, no point of view, nothing worth coming back for.
And the more of it floods in, the better audiences get at telling the difference between content that stops a thumb and content that means something. Consumer preference for AI-generated content reportedly collapsed from around 60 percent in 2023 to roughly 26 percent by 2025, according to agency research — and the trend line is the story. Viewers are not merely indifferent to the flood; they are increasingly fluent in spotting it. The uncanny valley of slop — skin too smooth, backgrounds that dissolve on close inspection, hands with too many fingers — has itself become a cultural shorthand, a badge readers wear the moment they smell the machine.
The authenticity backlash is already pricing in
The correction is measurable in how brands now brief creators. The instruction is no longer to polish more but to polish less: keep the wrinkled shirt, the unwashed dishes, the imperfect light. Founder-shot and behind-the-scenes material reportedly outperforms polished brand creative by three to eight times on the major short-video platforms. Scarcity creates value, and the scarcest resource in a feed of infinite synthetic gloss is the unmistakable sense that a specific person made this, for a reason, at a moment.
The problem was never the tool
The sharpest read of the slop epidemic comes from the marketing side of the industry: most of the garbage flooding feeds was not made by creators. It was made by people who believed a tool would hand them a creative idea, and the results show exactly what happens when generation substitutes for having something to say. The slop problem was never AI. It is AI used as a replacement for a point of view rather than an amplifier of one.
That distinction is the whole opportunity. Farms produce volume. Brands produce polish. Almost nobody produces conception — work with a legible human behind it, a reason to exist beyond filling a posting slot, and an aesthetic that coheres from piece to piece. The feed is flooded with output and starving for exactly that, and the flood has made the difference easier to feel, not harder.
What to actually do about it
If you make things, the strategy follows from the diagnosis. Use the tools — the cat is out of the bag and pretending otherwise concedes the field to the farms. But use them downstream of a decision only you can make: what you are for, what you are against, what only you would notice. Keep a visible hand in the work: your casting, your pacing, your strange specific details that no engagement loop would invent. Publish fewer things that are unmistakably yours rather than more things that are unmistakably nothing. And treat the audience's new sniffing skill not as hostility but as the market signal it is — the reward for specificity has never been higher.
The honest conclusion
Enshittification cannot be unlearned by the platforms; the extraction incentive is structural. But the content layer is where the decay happens, and the content layer is where you live. A feed is rotting; that is a description, not a verdict. Every wave of cheap novelty — stock photography, template design, farm content — has produced the same counter-value: work that could only have been made by someone who cared. The tools are in front of you, the gap in the feed is real, and the only open question is what you will make specific enough to prove a human was here.
