AI Summary
5 min readThe social media professionals Rachel Karten and Taylor Lorenz cover are not worried that AI will replace them. They are worried that their bosses will use AI to replace their judgment. Karten, who writes the Substack Link in Bio, described interviewing roughly one hundred marketers for an article titled “Does Your Boss Have AI Brain?” The pattern she found was consistent: a social media manager would craft a funny meme, send it to their supervisor for approval, and the supervisor would run it through Claude to ask, “Is this funny?” Another marketer told Karten that their boss only approved ideas that came from Copilot, so the team began mocking up their own proposals inside the Copilot user interface just to get sign-off. Karten called the experience “demoralizing as hell.” The problem, she argued, is not AI itself but the way it is being implemented—without training, without guardrails, without any shared philosophy about what the tool is for. At Condé Nast, she recalled, teams spent months learning how to use Asana properly. No equivalent onboarding is happening for AI on marketing teams now.
The consumer disconnect: hating AI slop while loving it
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:50) **Introduction: The Creator Economy Faces AI** - Live from LA, hosts Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal introduce the existential question facing creators: what happens when content creation becomes essentially free or extremely low cost.
- 2 (04:25) **The Current Vibes: Bosses With "AI Brain"** - Rachel Karten describes the most common way AI is showing up for marketing teams: through their bosses.
- 3 (07:30) **Consumer Attitudes: The "Fruit Slop" Paradox** - The hosts and guests explore why consumers publicly hate AI content but privately engage with it.
- 4 (10:28) **Incumbents vs. Newcomers: Who Wins?** - Discussion on whether established creators with proven authenticity become more valuable as AI lowers entry costs.
- 5 (16:57) **Productive Uses of AI in Marketing** - The conversation turns to genuinely positive, productive applications of AI beyond content generation.
- 6 (18:53) **The Threat of Chatbots vs. Scrolling** - How the rise of chatbot time might be cannibalizing the scrolling time that brands and marketers depend on.
- 7 (22:36) **Platform Power in the Age of AI Slop** - Do social media platforms become more or less powerful when content generation is essentially free?
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Social media is really strange these days: Increasingly, our feeds are starting to look uncanny, as AI slop proliferates all over the Internet. And for the professionals who are tasked with making content, whether it is social media managers or creators, it has been a head-spinning time of change. In this conversation, recorded at the Vermont in Hollywood, we get a primer on social media's AI era with two veteran Internet commentators, Rachel Karten (social media consultant and the author of the Link in Bio newsletter) and Taylor Lorenz (founder of User Mag). We discuss why people are afraid to admit that they love some genres of slop, why the AI discourse is evolving so rapidly, and whether our time online is moving away from scrolling feeds to engaging with chatbots.
Read more:
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