AI influencers are multiplying

If you think social media is full of slop right now, just wait for what's coming. Yesterday on X, which I subject myself to for research purposes, I stumbled across a startup that described itself as being the Claude for Social Media. I'm not gonna name them because I don't wanna send them traffic. Essentially, they create thousands of social media accounts, warm them and then pump them full of AI influencers that promote your product. They've dialed in formulas that go viral and then they scale them. The comment thread on this post I saw was insanity, with people vehemently calling them out, asking Grok if it's legal and basically blaming the downfall of social media on these guys. As for the founders, they were deep in those comment threads being defiant and unapologetic, basically answering every angry comment with so what? The bleak thing is within minutes of discovering the first company, I found a second company with a near identical launch video that described itself as being the Claude for Clipping. And then a third that described itself as being the Claude for AI UGC with a near identical launch video. All of the founders were actually fighting in the comments about how they had near identical launch videos. And I'm sure that's just the tip of the iceberg. But the reality is, all of these companies are flooding feeds with mass produced AI influencer slop where conventionally pretty women repeat identical hooks like, no, but seriously, I have to put you onto something. Here's something I knew would catch up with us. When follower counts were de-prioritized as a meaningful metric across social media accounts in favor of reach and impressions, it was only a matter of time before people or bots, or people babysitting bots, figured out how to game that system. This is classic perverse incentive or Goodhart's law. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. And to cultivate a following, you have to nurture relationships and be respectful of your audience's attention and trust. But to a mass views, you don't need any of that. And you can just implement tactical strategies like a drill sergeant for content and use psychological hacks that create visceral reactions. It's basically just an unregulated experiment on lab humans who are so hardwired for their need for dopamine. At the end of the day, it's not the shit quality of slop that concerns me. It's the rate at which it can multiply.