It’s a dreary Saturday in October and a mouse is breakdancing to LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem.” He’s got a blue suit on; behind him is an adoring crowd of young women wearing mouse ears and doing Jazzercise. There are 1,000 likes and 12 comments, most of which make no sense. “God,” says one. “Love,” says another.
I am on the cutting edge of the internet. This is the Meta AI app, an official home for the chatbot that also lives on WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, and when I begrudgingly downloaded it I was dropped straight into an infinite video feed. First it was the mouse; then a tidal wave; then a waving cat; and finally Jesus, handing fish out to a stiff crowd. This, according to Meta’s website, is Vibes: “where you can create and share short-form, AI-generated videos.”
A Labrador crosses the Niagara Falls on a tightrope. A St Bernard runs down a hill. “Cowabunga, snow hounds!” goes the tantalising first sentence of the caption; the app is so poorly designed that the rest of the text remains invisible. A girl has tried to animate a photograph of herself hugging an enormous Hello Kitty stuffed toy. Hello Kitty doesn’t return the affection; a third human arm reaches out from nowhere to embrace the subject instead.
For the past few years, Gen Z internet users have been calling this genre of unchallenging video “slop”. These productions are sub-lowbrow; they require no intellectual discernment to produce, and no taste either.
But I quickly encounter an emergent “slop underground”, which dredges itself onto my feed in ever greater amounts the angrier I get at it. It isn’t just dogs on tightropes; anonymous Vibes users are lifting their videos from a pilfered canon of upmarket artists and directors. This is where good taste goes to die. I can see the fashion and haircuts of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, the tell-tale retouched edges and bright colours of cult films edited and processed into Gif format on a bygone internet, the art styles of a hundred mid-century children’s illustrators.
There are many glamour shots of young women, the sort you might expect if you’re on Pinterest and scrolling through outfits. The Slop Underground accounts are full of them; you’ll see a few if you spend long enough scrolling past breakdancing animals on the default Vibes feed. One stands in front of a country house, pouting at an imaginary video camera. It’s golden hour and she’s dressed for a twisted game of cricket.
A man leaves his phone number in the comments.
“Call me,” he says.
Nobody is really using Vibes yet. Pubity, an online news aggregator with a 41-million-strong Instagram audience, has had a presence on the app for four days, during which time it has garnered a grand total of 11 followers. The most-followed person I can find only has about 1,000 fans. “Exploring AI,” reads his profile. “Follow me to view latest post. Inspiring stories · Fresh ideas · Daily motivation.” The feed has existed for nine days at this point and he has already posted over 100 videos. “Small steps build great journeys,” it says over a three-second video of a businessman walking down what looks like the Strand.
The app’s most prolific denizens are probably not real people. They have all been active since a few days before the feed launched, and they all have handles that could have emerged from the same Dungeons & Dragons name generator. “aurelia_cogsworth_everlight” comes up in my feed above “iris_rue,” “echo_binary_scribe,” “pip_rootwick,” “florence_albright,” and “aralyn_groveheart_weaver.” Even the user bios look AI-generated. “A serene realm where nature’s gentle whispers guide human existence,” says one, above a gallery of pseudo-Japanese cartoons and street footage. “Bioluminescent blossoms gently drift,” says another, “inspiring wonder and peaceful, reflective contemplation.”
I can’t help but ask myself: what’s the point? Conventional social media is primarily for stalking people, and secondarily for showing off to the people you’re optimistic enough to think might be stalking you. On incipient social platforms – think TikTok in 2020 – there’s always a barely-there promise that you might blow up and become an influencer, blessed with celebrity status and living on brand deals.
None of this works here. Plagiarism is already the app’s undoing. Its collections of visual schema are both predictable and entirely interchangeable. Everyone’s tried everything; even on the Slop Underground we switch from Studio Ghibli raindrops to Blade Runner puddles and pixelated sunsets. If you try and come up with a style of your own, someone will just “remix” it; there’s no point following anyone because you’ll just see the same things in a different order. There’s a “like” button, but it barely means anything when all you’ve done is type out a prompt anyone else could type out too; there’s a comment section, but barely anything exists to encourage conversation.
One day into my ordeal on Vibes, OpenAI launches the Sora app. It works almost exactly the same way as Meta AI’s, with rolling feeds and “remixes,” but the video quality is often nearly indistinguishable from real life. Computing costs to OpenAI sit at about $1 per video, reports the Economist; a free user may generate up to a hundred videos every day. One can make an educated guess at the motivation here. Venture capitalists have poured billions into AI companies that keep losing money; with AI chip-maker Nvidia valued at $4trn, some pundits fear an impending economic crash. “Generative AI has a massive problem…” writes tech commentator Ed Zitron. “Every single company is unprofitable.”
Enter the TikTok model. This is how we’ll claw back our funding, the tech scions must think. The short-video feed has come into play on almost every social site – including Instagram and Facebook – because it’s optimised to make as much money out of advertisers as possible. Videos are brief so you can fit as many ads as possible in a single viewing session; the format is engineered to be frictionless and addictive, so users spend longer and longer on their feeds. If you’ve been paying any attention to the internet over the past five years, you’ll be able to guess what’s coming next. Advertisers will pay for space between the videos on Vibes and Sora; the companies will do their best to suck users into addiction, and to absorb any profits into their corporate structure as the venture capital runs dry. But they will probably fail. Their inhumanity is working against them.
Vibes and Sora might be the first auto-scrolling short video platforms to be mind-numbingly boring. For hours at a time I forget I ever downloaded the Meta AI app. I repeatedly try to push through the first ten or 20 videos on my feed, fighting the urge to look away; eventually I give up and read a book instead. In a mid-career triumph, Mark Zuckerberg has solved my phone addiction.
[Further reading: Searching for London’s most performative male]
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