AI Media

AI generated content and interactivity will soon dominate the packetized media landscape. Let's figure out what this means.

i expect ai to be capable of superhuman persuasion well before it is superhuman at general intelligence, which may lead to some very strange outcomes

Sam Altman, OpenAI

Packetized media, the dynamic, granular media we consume and interact with on social networks, is transforming how we think and, by extension, how we organize society. As unsettling as this transformation has been so far, it’s far from over now that AI is being used to generate media packets. To understand what will happen, let’s break it down and put all of that AI innovation (LLMs to generative images, voices, and video) we’re seeing into context.

Packetized Sensemaking

Before we dig into what AI will be capable of doing, let’s dig into how packetized media works. It’ll give us a clue as to what AI-generated media will focus on.

• In response to the packetization of media, we’re experiencing a shift from long-form literary thinking to network pattern matching — from analysis (logic) to intuition (emotion). Patterns help us cope with high volumes of information, serving as a mental router that lets us categorize new information quickly.

• Packetized media is rocket fuel for intuitive perception because it is incredibly effective at conveying emotion in digestible chunks (below the level we’ve developed cognitive filters for), and emotion is at the heart of intuition. It provides you with the “feel” that lets you instantly understand something or the “sense” that something is off.

• Packetized media clusters around thematic patterns, from the social/cultural theme (trad family) to the political theme (MAGA fascism or woke communism) to the purient (viral videos). All of these themes contain an emotional subcontext that animates them. At the macro level, thematic patterns that resonate (likely due to some commonality in the emotional subcontext) can spontaneously combine into a greater whole; the red/blue networked tribes, for example.

This groundwork gives us a clear focus for AI media: it will generate themed, packetized media that triggers emotional reactions and empathy, enabling it to discover, build, and amplify thematic patterns. Human beings are already doing this— the last three elections were rife with it, and we see commercialized versions on TikTok and X — but AIs (at first with human participation but eventually autonomously) will take it to another level;

• Increase the rate and scale of packet production by several orders of magnitude. The flood will become a tsunami.

• Radically improve the emotive impact of individual packets by quickly stitching together generative video, voices, pictures, and text to maximize the emotional impact.

• This generative capability enables AIs to rapidly discover, explore, saturate, and then amplify thematic spaces.

Let’s flesh out this framework a bit with some detail.