Jonah Peretti, the founder and CEO of Buzzfeed, pissed off a lot of people a couple of years ago when he decided to gut the website’s sizable (and, at one time, award-winning) newsroom and pivot the platform towards a business model that favored AI-generated content. Now, Peretti says he’s worried about the rise of AI and its potentially noxious impact on our lives. He also says he has a solution to that problem: launching a new AI platform.
Yes, according to a weird, long blog post that Peretti published to his site Tuesday, the media executive isn’t feeling so great about the growing glut of AI-generated bullshit that is now roiling through the internet. Peretti starts the blog with an empathetic monologue about the troubling technological times we’re living through:
“Most anxieties about the future are really about the present,” Peretti writes. “We worry about a future where AI takes away our human agency, devalues our labor, and creates social discord. But that world is already here and our meaning, purpose, and agency has already been undermined by Artificial Intelligence technologies.”
Peretti goes on to complain about something that he calls SNARF, an acronym for “stakes, novelty, anger, retention, fear,” which are the primary emotions that content creators go after when they’re attempting to create compelling 14-second videos that can hijack your attention. Again, it is very ironic that Peretti is worried about SNARF, given the fact that Buzzfeed was a pioneer in SNARF-like creation. According to Peretti, AI is making it easier and easier for SNARF to take over our lives:
“Deep learning AIs are designed to maximize the time we all spend on these apps. While you are reading this memo, you are probably jonesing to switch over to Instagram or TikTok. It turns out when an app company doesn’t care about content and asks an AI to maximize usage the result is a service that incentivizes content that maximizes addictiveness.”
Peretti has a way to fight SNARF, and it is… a new social media platform that will “allow users to use AI to create and share content around their interests,” according to Axios. At first glance, it might seem like a deeply asinine move for Peretti to write a long online screed against a certain phenomenon, only to then announce that he’s in the process of trying to make money off of that very same phenomenon. But, having thought about it for a minute, I think I’m beginning to see his logic: the only way you can fight the SNARF is to…become the SNARF. Truly genius, Jonah. Seriously. Really smart stuff.
Oh, and we saved the best part for last: the name of Peretti’s new SNARF-fighting/creating platform is BF Island. Yes, BF Island. How cool is that? BF Island.
Maybe Peretti is earnestly perturbed by the AI bullshit that he sees all around him. Maybe he’s realized that AI-generated content isn’t really a huge revenue earner and he’s looking to diversify his business. Maybe he’s just really good at taking the national temperature and regurgitating what people want to hear. Maybe it’s all of the above. Any which way you slice it, though, we know one thing for sure: if there’s one guy who knows something about SNARF—the apparent epitomization of mindless, emotionally manipulative online content—it’s gotta be Peretti.
