AI could turn the internet into a mindless click machine — or fuel a cultural comeback, says Substack’s CEO.
Chris Best, the cofounder and CEO of Substack — the online platform best known for its paid email newsletters — said on an episode of “The a16z Podcast” published Wednesday that AI could flood the internet with “AI slop,” low-effort content designed to keep people scrolling.
“You could have a bunch of AI slop that kind of keeps dumb people clicking,” Best said.
But that the same technology could enable a very different outcome: a “future where there’s way more creative leverage” for independent creators, he said.
Best also said that the real bottleneck for media isn’t content, but attention.
“We’ve entered a world where attention is the scarce resource,” he said. “We have won the war on boredom.”
“There’s no scarcity of content, but there’s a huge scarcity of good content,” he added.
With tech advancing, Best said much of the internet is being optimized purely for engagement, which he compared to “drug addiction.”
“That side of the media is going to get supercharged,” he said. “We have very sophisticated AI goon bots now.”
Still, he sees hope in an alternative future.
“The other purpose of media is culture,” he said. “That is something that people really, really want as well.”
Substack, which lets writers earn directly from subscribers, raised $100 million in July. The round valued the newsletter platform at about $1.1 billion.
Best and Substack did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
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The AI era of social media
Social media platforms are already being swamped with AI-generated content.
Business Insider reported last year that a wave of startups like Faceless.video and AutoShorts.ai are making it easier for digital hustlers to chase views and cash in on creator-rewards programs or affiliate links.
For a fee, their tools auto-generate and post content directly to TikTok or YouTube — anywhere from three videos a week to 120 a month on a single account.
Faceless.video launched with a goal to automate “the entire process of being a content creator,” Jacob Seeger, one of its cofounders, told Business Insider.
“What traditionally used to take somebody tons of hours to dive in and learn how to edit a video or search through Reddit and try to scour some good stories to find, now essentially the platform handles all that for you,” Seeger said.
The rise of “AI slop” is also drawing attention at the highest levels. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump told reporters he believed a viral clip showing a black bag being thrown out of a window at the White House was “probably AI-generated.”
“It’s a little bit scary, to be honest with you,” Trump told reporters as he took questions at the White House on Tuesday afternoon.
“The last place I’d be doing it is that,” Trump said, “because there’s cameras all over the place.”
