The Attention Economy Is Broken — And AI Is About to Make It Worse

The attention economy — the system in which technology companies compete for human attention and monetise it through advertising — was already producing serious harm before AI-generated content arrived. The business models of the dominant social media platforms are built on capturing as much attention as possible, regardless of what that attention does to the people providing it.

The AI Content Flood

AI-generated content has lowered the cost of producing text, images, audio, and video to approximately zero. This means that the volume of content competing for attention is about to increase by orders of magnitude. The feeds and search results that are already difficult to navigate are about to become much harder. The signal-to-noise ratio, already strained, is about to be tested severely. The economic incentive to produce AI-generated content at scale is enormous and it is already being acted on.

The Trust Problem

As AI-generated content proliferates, the ability to distinguish genuine human expression from synthetic content becomes increasingly difficult. This is not just an aesthetic problem — it has serious consequences for how we evaluate information, how we form opinions, and how we understand what other people actually believe and experience. When everything could be synthetic, nothing can be trusted by default.

What Individuals Can Do

Actively curate your information environment. Be deliberate about whose content you consume, reduce time on platforms designed to maximise engagement rather than value, and invest in reading that rewards sustained attention. Subscribe to sources with clear editorial standards. Pay for quality journalism rather than relying on algorithmic feeds. The individual actions are limited but not meaningless.

What Needs to Change Systemically

The deeper solution requires changing the incentive structures of the platforms themselves. Business models that reward time-on-platform regardless of user wellbeing will produce harmful outcomes regardless of how thoughtfully individual users navigate them. The question of how to restructure those incentives — through regulation, alternative business models, or user-owned platforms — is one of the most important design questions of the next decade.