The “Contentification” of the Web: Automating (Cultural) Collapse

Please note that the date of this talk has been moved to Thursday 3 April 2025.

Generative Artificial Intelligence has been described as many different shades of disruptive. While scholars and commentators have noted its potential impacts on a range of industries and professions, this paper will focus on what its rollout might mean for digital culture more generally. Its main claim is that GenAI doesn't represent a break with a Web 2.0 culture organised around platforms – and conventionally defined by content made by users. Instead, it argues that GenAI represents the latest in a series of technical developments designed to automate the production of media content.

After proposing that we analyse GenAI systems using a rubric of “contentification” – the production of contentless content for the purposes of keeping media circulating and attention captured - this paper offers a pair of speculative propositions about what GenAI might mean for digital culture more broadly. First, if we understand the web as a basic infrastructure of our social and cultural lives, “contentification” threatens to drown out users by filling the web with noise. Second, if this content drives users off the web, and undermines platforms' attention-based business models, what GenAI arguably threatens is the web itself.

While the web might be a proverbial dumpster fire of toxic content, radicalisation, discrimination, and hate, it has nevertheless become a fundamental social and cultural infrastructure. What's worse than the web and the digital culture we have is having no web at all.