The chances of you getting to the end of this article are terrible. I know this because research from UC Irvine shows that people now have a median attention span of only 40 seconds, a massive 75% decline over the last 20 years.
This skittish, squirrel-like lack of focus is caused by a myriad digital distractions and self-interruption. I’m not sure if I’ve ever officially had attention deficit disorder but I seem to have worsening symptoms over the last few years.
And there’s a direct correlation between my symptoms and the sophistication of social media algorithms and the rise of AI.
As I sit down to write this, I feel a magnetic pull to my phone. My focus is constantly blunted by a barrage of dings and pings.
Like feral, urban squirrels full of crack, we’re hardly able to invest more than a few seconds in any narrative. We’re increasingly more easily distracted, darting from one trash can full of narcotics to the next.
The stories – if we can be so generous as to call them that – we mostly consume are junk food for our brains. The refined sugar treats we know are bad for us, but impossible to resist.
Advertising practitioners, spurred by the best-practice recommendations from big tech, are contributing to the frenzy.
Rather than focus on quality, they throw a few more drugs in the trash can in the hope that they can grab a few seconds.
Then social media platforms gleefully measure and report three-second views as part of their metrics, emphasising that the shorter the time-frame the more chance of success. That’s nonsense.
In contrast, people will sit through a three-hour podcast or go down a 45-minute YouTube rabbit hole on something they care about. Of course, there is a case for incisive storytelling. Most good narratives are brutally simple and hook you in from the very first second.
But people don’t engage with content because it’s short. They engage with it because it’s good.
The issue isn’t attention, it’s what earns it. And increasingly, what earns it is not narrative, or craft, but primarily dopamine and/or outrage. We’ve moved from a world of interruption to a world of addiction.
To be fair, this isn’t new. Advertising has always been a fight for attention. That’s the job. The difference is that the fight used to reward better storytelling.
If there was clutter, the answer was to be more interesting. You could be distinctive by having a distinct point of view.
Instead of diving into the raging river of effluent, you could make a stand on the river’s banks, and your message would be tenfold more powerful.
And just when we thought the volume couldn’t get any bigger, along comes AI, bringing with it the promise of faster production, lower costs, and infinite variations tailored to micro-audiences.
In reality, it’s more likely becoming an AI-powered slop engine. Churning out endless streams of mediocre, entirely forgettable content, most of which doesn’t get seen beyond the first few seconds, if at all.
AI is very good at structure. It can mimic tone, follow patterns, and assemble narratives that look like stories.
What it doesn’t have is taste. You can instruct your LLM, or AI language model, to be more critical, give it access to a tome of the best comedy writing in history, and you’ll still get a barrage of over-confident mediocrity.
Of course, there’s plenty of heavy cognitive lifting done by AI that’s already infinitely better than any human. For now – and maybe forever – when it comes to storytelling, there is still a humanity that can’t be replaced.
I’m sure AI will get a lot better at storytelling, and the sheer volume of output will be a blunt force outcome for stories that can grab attention, but let’s not forget that there were lots of mediocre adverts before AI.
Will AI make those mediocre storytellers better? No, it will just make it easier for them to be mediocre.
People are starting to sniff out AI slop, and they’re calling brands out on it, rightly so. How can they tell it’s AI? And why do they care? For the same reason, they do or don’t laugh at a joke. It either connects with them on a fundamental human level or it doesn’t.
As AI makes content cheaper and easier to produce, the value of human creativity doesn’t diminish. It compounds.
So where does that leave us? In exactly the same place we’ve always been… with less room for excuses. Every agency fighting for diminishing attention faces the same choice: add to the slop, or create something meaningfully distinctive.
The fundamentals haven’t changed. Emotion still matters. Insight still matters. Craft still matters. The only thing that’s changed is how we produce content and the environment it has to stand out in.
Attention isn’t gone. It’s in a mind-numbing stupor… and, over time, it will become a lot more selective. Just like we limit our sugar intake when we feel ill, we will hopefully start to limit, or stop, our slop intake and the pendulum will swing back to audiences wanting less, better content.
We won’t actually want to read or watch anything unless it comes from a trusted, slop-free source. That’s where I’d like to find an audience. So, marketers will have to make a choice. Race to the bottom of the slop barrel or create fewer, more meaningful connections.
Until that happens, the answer isn’t to make more slop. It’s to make something worth stopping for.
