We're entering the age of personal media.

As the attention economy has evolved, social media has become much more personalized. Optimizations in algorithms keep you attentive and engaged. They lift things from the ever-growing pool of available content to put them in front of you. All of this exists to keep you watching or scrolling. These algorithms learn with ruthless efficiency.

Social media has a limit, though. Someone has to create the content for you to consume.

AI does not share this limit. It can generate whatever a system decides you want to see.

ChatGPT was the fastest growing product of all time. It reached 100 million users within 2 months of launch. For comparison, TikTok took nine months to reach this user count.

LLM apps like ChatGPT and Claude let you ask for nearly anything you want. They can research esoteric topics and talk about your problems with a system that is always available. At the same time, we have rapid evolution of image, video, and audio generation models.

All of these together enable the creation of media that is just for you. This is coming at a time where media consumption only continues to rise.

I find this new reality both exciting and terrifying.

It’s exciting because it empowers learning and building rapidly. I run research queries regularly and answer questions might have taken days or weeks in the past. I’m not limited by existing research papers or the time it takes to source them.

Right along with that, I can build applications with unbelievable speed. This lets me try things out without spending days or weeks. In many cases, I can test out a feature idea within hours. Then there’s all the fun things image models can do.

It’s terrifying because it has the potential to amplify all the problems of the attention economy.

I worry about the societal costs of constant media consumption. There’re the echo chambers, the seemingly correlated rise in mental health issues, constant notifications, and just how much of your life it takes from you. Then you multiply that across the entire population.

The jury is still out on the impact of AI here.

My biggest problem with social media is that it’s a random reward system which can be highly addictive. Personal media, driven by AI, and requested by the user doesn’t have this random quality. So, you can get what you want and move on with your life.

I’m holding onto some optimism that this could lead to a turning point in our relationship with media consumption.

Then again, I don’t think personal media will really replace social media. Not in the short run, anyway. The much more likely future is that social media continues to grow and consume our time. Meanwhile, AI will speed up our other work and give us more time to consume.

It’s not the the future I want to see, but it’s the one I worry we’re headed towards.