The seminal paper that introduced transformer technology which eventually led to generative AI as we currently know it, was titled Attention is all you need (2017).

Generative AI has lowered the cost of content creation to basically zero, or “to cheap to meter”. We have a term for it: AI Slop.

The consequence is that we are drowning in information, or content. This isn’t entirely new, of course. But it gets a few degrees worse now.

The big tech companies don’t mind this trend. On the contrary, they all have platforms that provide some value by algorithmically curating things. You get your feeds, timelines, search results, etc.

The limited resource is attention.

So we come full circle, a cosmic joke of sorts. Attention is all you need feeding right back into itself. The Ouroboros?

Ouroboros
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2856329

It’s a bit like inflation (oversimplified – I’m not an economist). Things get more expensive. People want to make more money. If wages rise, things become more expensive.

Claude’s eloquent comment:

Tech platforms have positioned themselves as the arbiters in this ecosystem, using algorithmic curation to filter the overwhelming volume of content and thereby extracting value from both content creators seeking visibility and users seeking quality information. The cosmic joke, as you aptly put it, is that a paper titled “Attention Is All You Need” has inadvertently described not just a technical architecture but the resulting economic reality its technology would help create.