Buzzfeed CEO Aims To Solve AI Slop Problem With More AI Slop

You might recall Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti as the guy who gutted Buzzfeed’s talented news division and fired oodles of human beings back in 2023. As part of that transition, Peretti heavily embraced half cooked ‘AI’ technology in the form of generative and interactive AI chatbots he insisted would dramatically boost the site’s traffic and audience.

That didn’t do a whole lot to improve Buzzfeed’s fortunes, so now Peretti is back, with another new “pivot to video AI” that apparently involves talking a lot of shit about AI. In a new blog post, Peretti laments the way that AI has been clumsily rushed to market in a way that devalues human agency and labor, hoping you’ll apparently forget he was involved in using AI to devalue human agency and labor:

“Most anxieties about the future are really about the present. We worry about a future where AI takes away our human agency, devalues our labor, and creates social discord. But that world is already here and our meaning, purpose, and agency has already been undermined by Artificial Intelligence technologies.”

Peretti complains about something he calls SNARF, an acronym for “stakes, novelty, anger, retention, fear,” he says companies like Meta and TikTok have engaged in to grab consumer attention. Peretti’s solution to all of this? To build a new social media platform called BF Island he says will “allow users to use AI to create and share content around their interests.”

Peretti claims he’s going to be creating a “totally different kind of business, where it’s primarily a tech company and a new kind of social media company,” but it’s not entirely clear how Peretti will avoid the SNARF problem he wants you to forget he played a starring role in.

“If a lot of people click on it, it must be good” is the primary way to make money in the modern ad ecosystem, something that often directly conflicts with pesky stuff like ethics, quality, and the public interest. Peretti claims BF Island will be “built specifically to spread joy and enable playful creative expression.” Outlets like Axios can’t be bothered to mention Peretti’s role in precisely the sort of behaviors he complains about in his blog post.

Maybe Peretti can build something new and useful and interesting. But so far, AI has had a disastrous introduction to journalism and media, resulting in rampant layoffs, oodles of plagiarism, false and misleading headlines, and a whole bunch of sloppily automated news aggregation systems that are redirecting dwindling ad revenues away from real journalists and real journalism.

It hasn’t had much better of an impact on social media, given Facebook, Google, and TikTok are increasingly full of badly automated slop that’s making the internet less useful, not more.

That’s less the fault of the undercooked technology as it is the sort of fail-upward brunchlord executives in tech and media who genuinely appear to have absolutely no idea what they’re doing. The kind of folks all out of new ideas who see automation primarily as a way to dismantle labor, cut corners, save money, and create a sort of low-effort automated ouroboros that shits ad engagement cash.

Peretti very much was one of those guys, appears to still be one of those guys, yet simultaneously now wants to capitalize on the public annoyance he himself helped cultivate while very likely changing very little about what actually brought us to this point.