Soooo, Crypto Twitter is discussing the shift and growth of creators on the platform recently and I thought I'd weigh in on this.
A lot of people are mad, actually, so mad, and you see phrases like “AI Slops and memecoin devs” being thrown around.
Frankly speaking, I think the phrase “memecoin dev” should have never been allowed to fly, yet it did. Pump.fun built a unique product, but it did that for the worst crowd and now we have billions of dollars speculating on memes. The cost of embracing this experiment is that the rest of the ecosystem cannot access the much needed value/capital and attention to develop.
But who's to be blamed?
Pump.fun and its “army of content and dev creators” or the rest of the ecosystem (considered the high-value end) that couldn't compete effectively?
The thing is, the discussion is centered on “creators” but what should really be looked at is the attention economy because creators evolve/adjust to that and that is literally the case here.
What is the attention economy?
Let's ask AI, shall we? :)
The attention economy is a concept that describes how human attention is treated as a scarce and valuable resource in the digital age. In this economy, businesses, platforms, and content creators compete to capture and hold people’s attention, often for the purpose of monetization through advertising, data collection, or brand engagement. — ChatGPT.
A couple of things to note:
—Attention is a scarce because there's more demand than supply.
—Businesses, platforms and creators aim to capture it (they have to fight for it).
—Usually for the purpose of monetization.
The post on X:
the worst recent trend is the word "creator" now meaning someone who creates soulless slop for engagement rather than someone who creates useful things or art
basically buzzfeed/tabloid on steroids — mert on X
I don't know if I've ever used the term “creator” when referring to myself, but the term, to me, has always seemed like something that should be reserved for V-bloggers. Think about YouTube creators that post deepdive videos on historical events. Those were the creators I grew to know.
Notwithstanding, unless you're not completely being honest with yourself, creators were born to serve a purpose — capture attention by feeding a curiosity, offering knowledge or solving a problem — and they are still doing that.
Notice that there's an AI generated text in this piece, but is what I am writing an AI Slop as a result? I would say that it depends on who's being asked. Sometimes it doesn't even have to be 100% AI for someone to throw that phrase at you, and I would argue that even then, that opinion doesn't really mean much if the content, somehow, flies (gains support through engagement or monetary rewards where it applies).
Why?
We have to ask ourselves some honest questions like:
Why do people engage or support a content?
Why do they do it the second and third time?
If an AI generated content is doing numbers, I'm sorry to break it to you, it was valuable to a lot of people. And when I say numerous, I am not referring to views alone, because that could just be the algorithms favoring it.
I am talking about reactions as likes and positive comments. It does not matter if it is 100% AI!
Someone somewhere thought a topic would interest people, took the initiative to generate a content around it with AI and posted it on a social platform and people loved it and you're upset about that?
Clearly, you're upset about the wrong thing, being the creator, instead of the people loving the content (the attention economy, essentially). Everyone wants to claim that they are 100% interested in human creativity and everyday we find assholes, in great numbers, on the internet bullying people putting out their creative works online.
All it takes is the algorithm pushing you to the wrong crowd.
This would suggest that people hating AI content doesn't mean that what it produces isn't valuable, it just means that it isn't valuable to the crowd that's viewing it, just as a lot of creative human content will be ignored or insulted by certain people.
We are really getting mad over the wrong things.
“Oh AI content is making numbers and earning most of the mindshare and dollars.”
This is the reality because it is valuable, if it wasn't, people wouldn't engage or support it.
If I opened a post and disliked it, I'd click away. I wouldn't stay to give a thumbs up or positive comment. Others doing it means it came off as valuable to them!
It doesn't matter how stupid it seemed to me.
TikTok showed us that the human attention span is as low as 15 seconds on the internet, so if you can't make the best of it, you won't capture a significant mindshare.
The fact that people seem to think that it is “easy” is what actually gets to me.
Have you tried spamming X with AI content before, how famous have you become since?
There's obviously more work involved. The generation of the content is just the easy part and people just hate that!
Creators, in great numbers, posting AI generated content isn't the problem (yet?), because if it were, we wouldn't have it going viral and earning lots of love.
I've personally been around people that sit and listen to stories that are obvious to me to be written by AI. I tell them this and that it's stupid and the responses I usually get is that they don't care and actually love it.
Why should I then hate the creators when they are obviously making someone's day?