The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

by Chris Hayes

You can easily imagine a world with AI churning on both sides of this attentional battle—AI spam generation and AI-powered spam filters, a little like the tail end of the steroids era in baseball when both the batters and the pitchers were juiced out of their minds. Jonathan Frankle, a computer scientist at the AI firm Databricks, described this scenario to The New York Times’ Ezra Klein as the “boring apocalypse” scenario for AI: “We use ChatGPT to generate long emails and documents, and then the person who received it uses ChatGPT to summarize it back down to a few bullet points, and there is tons of information changing hands, but all of it is just fluff. We’re just inflating and compressing content generated by A.I.”[49]