Jonah Peretti, Who Filled BuzzFeed With AI Slop, Now Says AI Is Threatening Human Agency

After an embarrassing pivot to AI content, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti says he's had enough of all the ragebait, clickbait, and fake news.

Peretti, who proudly announced in May 2023 that AI will "replace the majority of static content," and gloated that its AI-generated content was outperforming its pesky human employees, has seemingly turned another leaf.

In a rambling new blog post, Peretti argued that a "future where AI takes away our human agency, devalues our labor, and creates social discord" is already here, pointing the finger at tech companies who he said coerced the media into producing a flood of what he calls SNARF ("stakes, novelty, anger, retention, fear") content, which he says manipulates readers into sticking around.

According to Peretti, the use of AI has "already shipped the dystopian AI future many people are worried might come in the future."

"They’ve already delivered a MAGA President that spews SNARF and a woke counter-culture that celebrates the assassination of a health insurance executive — big stakes, lots of novelty, and plenty of anger, retention, and fear!" he wrote.

After all those grandiose claims, Peretti announced the launch of a "new social media platform built specifically to spread joy and enable playful creative expression" called — we are not kidding — "BF Island."

Oh, and how will BF Island work? It'll "allow users to use AI to create and share content," per Axios.

It all rings very hollow. After surrendering BuzzFeed to AI, Peretti is complaining that Facebook and TikTok used AI to trap users, and his solution is to build yet another AI-powered social network.

And that's without getting into how BuzzFeed has been using AI to fill the internet with insipid slop for years now, from borderline unintelligible quizzes to incredibly lazy travel guides.

"This post was enhanced with AI creativity tools," reads a note appended to countless posts published on the site.

In other words, BuzzFeed itself has quickly become the epitome of the manipulative media landscape Peretti is claiming to decry.

Instead of acknowledging his own role in giving up "human agency" and "devaluing labor" — BuzzFeed has lost huge swathes of its workforce over several rounds of layoffs and wiped out most of the company's stock value over the last four years — Peretti is blaming the tech sector for his failings.

"It is hilarious to me that so many people still blame 'The Media' when the behaviors of the media are largely shaped by the much larger tech platforms, who distribute most of the world’s content, despite being mostly disinterested in the content itself," he wrote. "Nevertheless, they love to blame the media and take zero responsibility for the media ecosystem that they were instrumental in creating, almost by accident as a byproduct of the AI wars."

To be clear, Peretti is right about a few things. Tech companies do have a long history of coercing the media into tapping into what he's calling SNARF content through the use of algorithms. In simple terms, the loudest piece of content wins, creating a toxic feedback loop.

But where Peretti's "anti-SNARF manifesto" falls apart is in his continued pursuit of AI slop.

And considering Meta's disastrous attempts to populate its increasingly abandoned social media platforms with fake AI users and AI engagement bait, relying on the same tech may not even be the path to profitability Peretti thinks.

More on BuzzFeed: BuzzFeed Sells "Hot Ones" as It Pivots to AI-Generated Content