No, that's not what he's saying. Broadcast TV & radio is human-generated, audio and video, and not immersive. It's several steps behind the trend he's predicting. And they are also not equivalent in terms of getting user engagement and attention, which is why those industries have shrunk so much.

TikTok isn't that far off from America's Funniest Home Videos.

I wonder if there are individual YouTube compilations of similar videos (think "Funny Cats" montages) that have generated more profit than Funniest Home Videos shows.

None of those are AI-generated (therefore don't have the potential massive automated scale) or auto-play.

Max Headroom was a human powered simulation of such a future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom

There was a time I hadn't thought about Max Headroom in years, now I feel like he's all over the place again.

are you sure? it sounds like the exact same playlist on every station with the same owner in the same market with such little care about the content in the playlist but only based on an algorithm.

so maybe AI === brain dead corporate owners?

You can't ignore matters of degree. It does sound similar, but just by reducing the content chunk length to ~20 secs, they've dramatically improved the algorithmic manipulation and ad insertion (from their point of view), making it all far more effective.

In the old model people left the tv droning in the background, in the new model, people are riveted by their phones (with 2nd and 3rd screens (and radio (and billboards)) droning in the background).

IMO the differ here is less about AI vs human curated, but curated/generated for a very broad audience vs one specific consumer, ideally live as their mood or interests change. We aren't there yet with the highly dynamic mood and interest changes (e.g. interest fading after 5 Dr pimple popper videos, let's throw in some wingsuit stuff), but it's on the same trajectory. Address broad audience -> address smaller, niche audiences -> address individuals -> address individuals in the moment

Yes, we already have "slow AI". It's the corporate paperclip machine. It's has a strict value function; make money to shareholders. And it will do what ever it takes to make more of it.

All these ppl scaring us with AGI are either distracting us from the clear and present dangers of slow AI so they can keep profiting from it , or are just duped by silly technooptimism.

Why do you think that a malevolent AGI wouldn't use these tactics to make money / influence public perception?

I think these are two sides of the same coin.

Of course it will, but it's something happening now by slow AI. We don't need any research on some hypothetical. We don't need to frame this as a technological problem, it's clearly a social one, of which we suffer the consequences today.

Broadcast radio & tv are definitionally auto-play, arguably much moreso than social media apps which have pause and rewind and browsing functionality.

I digress, the scalability point is fair and this is an irrelevant sidebar

Being only semi-serious, but: wouldn't an auto-generated Netflix look pretty much like Netflix?