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AI Video Platforms Will Make TikTok Look Tame
On the addictive nature of high-quality AI videos
If you think teens spending 2–3 hours a day on TikTok is insane, you haven’t considered this possibility: Short of skipping sleep, young people with no professional duty have up to 12 free hours to melt their attention spans in the scroll mills. But worry not, AI video platforms will make sure you don’t have to imagine what that looks like.
I’ve written about AI video a few times — from praising the work it must have taken Google engineers to go from this to this (Will Smith spaghetti) in two years, to warning about the societal risks, among them the liar’s dividend (passing a real as fake) and the trust flip (you can only trust what you already trust) — but I have seldom mentioned how the existence of in-demand, high-quality, customizable AI videos will affect young teenagers already rotting their brains in the shores — or may I say, sewers — of TikTok and similar places.
They are already dispossessed of any means to resist the wave of AI slop, or worse, of any willingness to do so. As the primary audience of a product that serves no purpose other than perpetual entertainment, these kids ought to haunt the edges of my every vision of the future. They’ve been forsaken, yet they’re our only hope — for one day, they’ll bear the burden…
