this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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I realize younger people probably don’t feel this so viscerally, but shorts (not all, but many) are very in tune with old TV advertising format. It’s like an endless stream of Super Bowl ads, at best. Repetitive music. Designed for the short attention span. Makes you seek a product, in this case, more of itself.
Now, look at the “upcycled” (/s) version of YouTubr content. Reused video clips with a shiny, hyper-reactive talking head in front of it. Not human expression but caricatures thereof. Millions of views. Millions of viewers. For years. Not of human faces but caricatures of human faces. This garbage won’t go away because it’s consistantly being watched.
Now, after all that priming, introduce AI into the two most popular social medias, short form and long form.
How does this fully primed crowd know the difference? How would they suddenly feel the need to leave? Not you or me, but the people who consume the ad clones and charicaturized crap daily? The same people who slide their phones out of their pockets to scroll shorts, on automatic, whenever they have 5 free minutes at work. How do they even spot the difference after years of consuming garbage?
TLDR Less human interaction + more fake, caricaturized human vid content = where we are now, with AI on social media.
Other than ads, I think we’ve had a lot of “shorts” style content that people gravitated to in “the old days”. Things like AFV, whose line, QI, basically anything where it’s not a complete consistent show but a bunch of smaller capsulated segments.