The problem with feeds is the same as the problem with AI art
February 27, 2025
Cory Doctorow on the five year anniversary of Pluralistic:
For me, the problem with algorithmic feeds is the same as the problem with AI art. The point of art is to communicate something, and art consists of thousands of micro-decisions made by someone intending to communicate something, which gives it a richness and a texture that can make art arresting and profound. Prompting an AI to draw you a picture consists of just a few decisions, orders of magnitude fewer communicative acts than are embodied in a human-drawn illustration, even if you refine the image through many subsequent prompts. What you get is something “soulless” – a thing that seems to involve many decisions, but almost all of them were made by a machine that had no communicative intent.
This is the definition of “uncanniness,” which is “the seeming of intention without intending anything.” Most of the “meaning” in an AI illustration is “meaning that does not stem from organizing intention”:
The same is true of an algorithmic feed. When someone you follow—a person—posts or boosts something into their feed, there is a human intention. It is a communicative act. It can be very communicative, even if it’s just a boost, provided the person adds some context with their own commentary or quoting. It can be just a little communicative, too—a momentary thumbpress on the boost button. But either way, to read a feed populated by people, rather than machines, is to be showered with the communicative intent of people whom you have chosen to hear from.
(emphasis mine). The uncanniness of the “for you” feed is what gives social media a certain distaste in my mouth. I imagine it like the bitter coating applied to Nintendo Switch game cartridges. There is no human involved, you see an infinite flow of potentially interesting content determined by a probability of what you are likely to click on. You might be curious enough to click on it, but it’s not something you chose to follow. After awhile you don’t really feel in control any more.
The problem with these feeds is there is no way to just turn them off. Or even curate yourself what topics you might be interested in or not. Seth Godin offers another perspective. We do not need a machine in our pockets to feed us a constant unending stream of news. I think there are two thing one must do to counteract the influence of suggested content because it is impractical to do so 100%.
- Install blocking extensions
I use Block Facebook Reels, Hide Youtube-Shorts, and F-B Hide Recommendations and Reels.
- Keep lists of people and accounts you follow and visit them on a regular basis.
This isn’t to say I never enjoy scrolling through the For You feed on occasion, but I don’t want to vox populi to take up free rent in my head. This one is a little more open ended. The easiest way is to keep a list of bookmarks in your browser or in a text file and pick one day a week to visit each one. It is by no means a perfect solution, but it creates a sense of intent. You can still choose to use social media, but on your terms instead of through the lens of doomscrolling.