209: The Zero-Effort Lie - How AI Is Accelerating the Death of the Internet

The promise is irresistible: generate anything you want, instantly, with zero effort. We’ve been told that AI is the great democratizer, but in this episode, we argue it’s actually the most catastrophic lie of the digital age.

The truth is, this endless supply of cheap, fast content is fundamentally destroying value and driving the collapse of the internet as we know it. We're not seeing liberation; we're seeing an intellectual lazy river that's turning the web into a toxic digital swamp.

In this episode, we break down the three deadly flaws of the zero-effort economy:

• The Dunning-Kruger loop: Why amassing "zero knowledge" before hitting 'generate' is so dangerous. We look at why amateurs, armed with powerful tools, lack the expertise to judge quality, creating a flood of confidently flawed content that only "kinda looks good."
• The meaning crisis & The Betty Crocker dilemma: If creation is instant, cheap, and disposable, why should you care? We dive into the psychology of effort and the IKEA Effect to explain why platforms had to force you to "add the human egg." The only way to save your work is to deliberately reintroduce friction.
• The platforms are killing at (the enshittification): This isn't just an accident; it’s calculated decay. We expose how platforms are actively boosting AI Slop (low-quality, high-volume garbage) to maximize their profits, directly crowding out genuine human creators. We reference Cory Doctorow's essential concept of Enshittification to explain how the entire internet is being systematically poisoned.
• The final warning: What happens when we keep chasing "more, more, more low-effort shit"? The existential threat of model collapse, where AI trains on its own garbage, fundamentally poisoning the source of all knowledge and accelerating us toward a "dead internet."

The only way to fight back is to choose effort over ease.

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Transcript

The Zero-Effort Creativity Crisis
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[00:00:00] Welcome back to No Hacks podcast. I'm your host, Sonny, and today I'll talk about a big lie could be the biggest, the most tempting, the most catastrophic lie being sold to us right now. It is a lie that you can create anything you want with zero effort and zero knowledge thanks to ai, not just you, the listener.

Anybody can create anything they want with no effort and no knowledge about it. Thanks to ai, you've heard a pitch. It is the future. You can generate professional grade videos from a single prompt. You can write scripts. Product ideas create art instantly, effortlessly, cheaply. It's supposed to be the great democratization of creativity.

The barrier to entry is gone. All you need to do is believe Mariah Carey with the Houston saying about it in 1998, prince of Egypt. But here's the gut punch. What we [00:01:00] are actually getting is the complete and total collapse of quality and meaning. This is not liberation. This is one way ticket to lazy town.

When creation costs nothing and takes no time, guess what? It has no value. We're trading skill for speed, and what we are looking at now is a catastrophic. Shortage of meaning. 

The zero effort Promise is the ultimate hack, a self hack on your brain, on our platforms, and on the future of human work, and it's driven by three deadly undeniable flaws. So let's dive in.

The first flaw is a disaster waiting to happen. It's what happens when you hand a rocket launcher to a toddler, and the toddler immediately thinks that they're an aerospace space engineer. Could be a toddler, could be an 80-year-old Dorito man. Same thing if you ask me. So [00:02:00] when you, the person who's never done something like graphic design, never written a feature film, never coded a complex system.

When you use an AI tool to generate that thing, you literally lack the knowledge to judge if the output is any good. You have no expertise. You can only tell that it kinda looks good. So if LLM for you stands for looks legitimate, cool. Anything else, listen on, this is mimicry. It's great mimicry, but it's still mimicry.

It gives you, that looks good. Facade.

It's aesthetically plausible. It's coherent enough to pass a quick scroll. This is. Performative ai, it's all about mimicking production, not delivering deep creativity or real empathy. It's missing originality, nuance, common sense, and most importantly, your human lived experience. And this is what ugly little truth of Dunning Kruger effect kicks you right in the mouth.

If you don't know [00:03:00] anything about a topic, Dunning Kruger says you will wildly overestimate your own competence. Since the cost of production is now zero, thanks to ai, the internet is flooding with people who genuinely believe that their generic machine produced bullshit story, image, whatever is genius.

They cannot see the flaws in the Bland pros, the formulaic structure or the logical flaws that a real pro would spot in half a second. So what happens now, we are suffering a flood of confidently flawed content. This is not just bad poems written by chat, GBT. This is, this has huge implications.

Algorithms already dictate what you see online. Now users are generating content that is optimized not for truth, but for predictable algorithmic acceptance. We are already seeing AI models exhibit Dunning Kruger like behavior themselves, which means bad AI is fueling confident bad users. [00:04:00] And then if you feel confident, bad AI and the cycle not only continues, it accelerates.

The machine is confident. The user is more confident and the result of all that is a mounting of digital garbage that demands expert review just to figure out what is wrong with it. It's a confident game and your ability to critically think is the price you are and will be paying.

So we've established zero Effort means junk. Let's talk about why Zero effort. It destroys you and your willingness to do things. Let's call this the meaning crisis, and the perfect analogy for this is the Betty Crocker cake mix. You may know this story if you have read any marketing blogs. When the instant cake mixes first came out, I dunno, I'm gonna say forties, fifties, sixties, whatever it was, they were a flop.

Why? Because all you had to do [00:05:00] was add water. People felt zero connection to the product because you just need to add water. No effort, no meaning, no satisfaction. The brilliant fix was subtraction. So they took out the powdered egg and forced the consumer to add one fresh egg themselves and that small.

Friction filled act gave the consumer investment. It transformed the experience into something appreciated, something tied to the IKEA effect. We value what we put effort into building. You don't put any effort into creating alop. The lesson is that you cannot cheat effort without cheating satisfaction.

When creation is fully automated, and I'm not talking just about ai, workflows, I'm talking about, uh, you have zero input. You're not even creating the workflow. You vaporized the psychological value derived from [00:06:00] contribution. You ensure that the mass production of content that is fundamentally meaningless to the person who created is what's happening.

You became a prompt whisper, prompt engineer. Is that a bad word? Now, you're not an author. You're left with the creative's paradox. You're empowered by the technology, but you keep asking yourself, wait, is this this even mine? Like, if people don't care about it, if I don't care about it, did it even happen?

That machine, the ai, the LLM, cannot replicate your unique worldview or your messy, beautiful human emotions. That is the most valuable thing that you bring to the table. Not some 10 x output of something nobody gives a shit about. It's being human and everything that is involved with being human.

That is the valuable thing. If you want to survive and retain your sense of ownership, you have to consciously introduce the digital equivalent of that fresh egg from Betty Crocker cake mix.

You [00:07:00] must reintroduce friction, the intensive editing, the guiding the expert verification. That effort is the necessary quality barrier against the rising tide of this disposable garbage that is AI slop,

and now. Now let's get to the real villain. The Dunning Kruger Amateurs armed with zero effort tools are creating a total mess. But let me tell you what, the platforms that we're all on all the time are really doing. They're using this slop to actively destroy the internet for profits, not destroy themselves, not destroy your LinkedIn feed or whatever else.

They're literally destroying the internet as we know it. This is not an accident. This is the primary accelerant of and acidification the phrase that was coined by Cory Ro. It's an idea that he expanded in his book that just came out in stratification, where everywhere everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it.

I haven't read it yet. I will and I will talk about it in [00:08:00] this podcast, but hey, there are worse things you can read these days. So he talks about the systemic decay of platforms where smart people, executives choose the shareholder profits over user experience. And the three stage roadmap of DK is platforms.

Are good. They're amazing. When they launch to attract you, then they abuse you to make things better for their business clients, advertisers. And finally, they abuse the business clients to claw back all the value for themselves. Now, AI slop is like napal. For this fire, the low quality, high volume garbage, the digital clutter that prioritizes speed and quantity over substance.

It's just infinite spam, and the platforms are not trying to stop it. They're even boosting it. If you look at the evidence of, of what's actually happening, 50% of web pages are now [00:09:00] created by ai. There was a study that just came out 

So this is the first time that more than half of the internet was created by ai. It's a big moment in, in history, at least of the internet. Now that's one thing. So everything is becoming more and more AI generated , that the platforms are encouraging it. So if you look at meta, there's a lot of AI generated bullshit there. It's terrible. And instead of simply blocking it and getting rid of it, what do they do? They add ai chat bots that, you know, they, they, they add features that can generate more of this. So they're creating their own slop to replace human interaction, just to keep those fake engagement metrics up.

So the platforms want this because it looks good on paper. Does it lead to something good? I dunno. TBD now? The third thing, if you look at, if you look at something like Amazon, how many AI books are there? The completely unedited AI garbage, the copycat summaries, the [00:10:00] guides that are completely fraudulent, that divert sales from real authors, because bad actors can churn out content instantly and at zero cost.

Spotify should even talk about Spotify and the AI music there. I don't know. To me, K-pop sounds like ai, so uh, I'm probably not the best person to talk about AI and music. This is the key, is that this is not just noise. This is active and calculated degradation of everything that we have been using for the last few decades.

Those platforms are consciously crowding out the genuine human crafted content, and that's kind of becoming a novelty these days. They're doing all of that in pursuit of cheap, scalable filler. So what happens when we keep chasing more, more, more, more, more low effort? Shit, we get, we already got that attention crisis.

Your brain is constantly overwhelmed. What's your attention span? Is it three seconds? [00:11:00] Is it seven? Is it 11? And this learned passivity means that we entirely rely on algorithms for curation. And we allow the platform to solidify their control over what we consume and feed us more slop. But the most critical, the most existential threat to the internet, not to the, to humanity, is the model collapse.

I know Elon talks about population collapse. I think we'll get a model collapse before we get population collapse. But, you know, let, let's see what happens. So if you're AI systems, if you are chat, GPT, if you're clot, if you're Gemini. If they're increasingly trained on their own generic, low quality, repetitive outputs, which half of the web, half of the web, first time ever, half of the web is AI bullshit, not all of it, but half of the web is ai.

Those models will fundamentally poison the source of all knowledge we have available online. When these inaccuracies and [00:12:00] landless, when they accumulate, and eventually when the models become less capable, even less accurate, and even more prone to error, whose fault is that? Is it us for feeding them or is it them for eating?

Will we feed them? I don't know. So if the entire digital sphere is just covered in AI generated content, the digital world. Stops reflecting human experience. And the consequence of that is not, it's not just a cluttered internet, it's a dead internet where the foundational data required for continued intelligence, both human and artificial, is polluted beyond recovery.

Think about Chernobyl. I don't know. I've been getting a lot of those short clips on YouTube from the Chernobyl HBO show these days. I, I, I guess I clicked one. Think about that, that that land. Don't go there. Our internet. Do you want to go [00:13:00] there in five years? In 10 years? Does it exist? We'll see, so the only pushback to this, the only thing we can do to fight back is just show some effort when we are creating things.

Don't fall for the one click, one prompt. Things that promised that it's going to be good. Don't. Take it as good unless you check if it's good. The good thing is that there's some AI fatigue, especially Gen Z and younger kids. What's it? Gen Alpha, I dunno. Uh, the digital natives, they're kind of getting critical of the poorly implemented ai.

I love the fact that kids don't seem to love. Don't fault for ai. That seniors fault for on, on Facebook. Now the regulators are pushing for mandatory AI content labeling. That could be a good thing. 'cause you know, if you label something as ai, [00:14:00] consumers trust it less and they.

They think about things like critical evaluation. However, you can remove that label. You can re-upload, you can change, you can, I'm not sure this is the solution because the, the cheater is always going to be one step ahead. And also the copyright law, I think it's still on the side of humans. We'll see if.

It stays like that. But currently, I, I, I think AI generated content does not qualify for copyright protection unless there's a significant human element that was involved. And I expect this law to get significantly worse or significantly better for humans depending on, I, I don't know what it depends on, but it's not going to stay like this.

It's going to swing all the way, one way or all the way another way. So. What I'm trying to say now, I dunno. 15 minutes in, around 15 minutes in. What I'm trying to say is that you must choose [00:15:00] effort over ease if there's zero effort in everything you're doing. Are you even human? So don't compete on speed.

Define your creative identity by using AI for what you find tedious, but preserving what you love, and that is your unique perspective, your specialized expertise and the emotional connection that the machines cannot and never will be able to replicate. The lesson of that cake mix story is just break an egg, add it, mix it up a little bit. Think about it. It's something you made. Choose friction. 'cause that is the only thing that can save the integrity and value of human creation and help it survive this accelerating, horrible digital decay that you see everywhere around you. 

Thank you for listening to the podcast. I'm Sunny, and if you wanna support the podcast, just subscribe, rate an [00:16:00] episode, share it with someone you care about. You can go to no hacks pod.com. And if you wanna read no hacks content, there's a substack, it's no hacks.substack.com, so please consider subscribing and sharing those articles with someone you care about.

Talk to you in the next one.