[Essay] Ultra-Processed Information: AI and the Coming Deluge of Noise

This essay is adapted from the Frankly episode posted on February 27th, 2026 titled, “Ultra-Processed Information: AI and the Coming Deluge of Noise.”

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I increasingly feel that, as a species, we’re living through a slow motion tragedy. It is my greatest hope that with the work on this platform, The Great Simplification, we can help people engage with the ongoing more-than-human predicament in ways that alter the default pathway – not to preserve the world as we know it, but perhaps so a better one can emerge. That’s going to require knowledge, sensemaking, courage, and categories of intervention.

Preceding any of that, it requires us to have agency at the level of the individual human. But before we can have actual agency, we also need the feeling that we have agency – which I increasingly think most of us lack.

This week’s topic was meant to be about this perceived lack of agency and some suggestions on what to do about it in the face of the metabolic-economic Superorganism, as it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. But when I thought about it more, I realized that there’s a prequel I want to highlight first. It’s something I’ve been noticing in my own life – and given that many of you are consuming this content online I assume that you have too, at least in a rhyming sense.

I now open my phone in the morning (hopefully after the 12-minute elephant path meditation that I’m supposed to be doing upon waking) to find an endless stream of headlines, threads, clips, charts, hot takes, and counter hot takes with confident explanations of what is happening today, why, and the implications. After swimming in some of this, I actually feel a loss in orientation rather than the clarity that I was looking for.

I’m pretty worried about this. There’s always been more information than any one human can process and hold. But what’s changing now, and in my opinion is about to change massively because of AI and algorithms, is the sheer speed and scale of information available to us – and dare I say promoted to us.

The Signal and the Noise

We’re entering a period where those with strong foundational knowledge and an understanding of how to use large language models will actually increase the true signal: the knowledge, integration, and making sense of things. However, the parallel increase in sheer content – the noise – is going to far outpace the signal. Regular people will experience a flood of content so large, it’s going to make many people who are online and accessing media feel like they’re drowning.

New AI systems make it so extremely cheap to generate text, stories, narrative, and coherent strings of words. Something I’ve often repeated, including in our college-level textbook, is that the human mind can imagine millions of times more sentences and word combinations than can possibly exist in the real world. Now AI is going to do that on steroids.

Paired with humans, they’re going to produce fast and confident summaries, honed arguments, explanations, and answers at a scale that we’ve never seen before, all with a tone of competence and authority. Of course, there will also be summaries of others’ work – and summaries of the summaries. I imagine it won’t be long, even with the small number of followers on this channel, until there are AI-generated summaries of my monologues posted by people I don’t know.

The universe of potential knowledge, or things claiming to be knowledge, is about to explode…and it really hasn’t even started yet. In the graphic above, each cube represents 3.2 million people. The one red square is people coding or vibe coding, the yellow cubes are those paying $20 per month for an advanced large language model, and the green cubes are those using free chatbots. The gray cubes – representing 6.8 billion people in total – have never meaningfully used AI at all. So, you can see that this is still very early days for the pipeline of AI-enabled content as more and more of these gray boxes turn green, yellow – or even red.

Although these systems can write mesmerizing and witty paragraphs in two seconds, this doesn’t mean it’s the same as writing that is thoughtful, helpful, or even accurate for navigating the world around us.

I think the sea change ahead is that, as more and more people use AI, the scarce resource is no longer going to be content or information. It’s going to be authenticity, judgment, and the ability to discern what is grounded in truth and reality.

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History Repeats Itself

Beyond AI, it’s dawned on me that this tectonic shift we’re seeing in online information is a pattern we’ve seen before in the physical world: first with our food systems, and then subsequently our physical health and nutrition.

As a society, we have completely re-engineered our food systems away from high-quality soil and nutrient-dense raw ingredients and toward synthetic fertilizers and food products engineered for shelf life and irresistible taste. I could go into a lot of detail about this, but the summary is that there’s no part of the food system left untouched. Just like AI, it’s very costly from an energy standpoint – in fact, we use something like 12 to 14 calories of fossil fuels to deliver one calorie of industrialized food to the dinner table.

This fossil-fueled expansion of our food systems created real abundance when it came to global calories produced and how many people we could feed.

But if we look at a layer underneath that, it also created a bizarro result.

The world currently has almost 3 billion people who are overweight and almost 1 billion that are malnourished. And in many places, including my country, we have people who are both overfed and undernourished at the same time. Recent studies have found about half of the households in the U.S. who struggle with malnourishment have at least one overweight or obese person. It is completely possible to be swimming in calories and still be underfed on the vitamins, minerals, and everything else needed to actually build a body.

In fact, a large majority of modern food is not designed to nourish us at all. It’s designed to be addictive – in a literal sense – so it continues to sell at a profit. (If you want to hear more about this, check out TGS #69: Processed Food, Metabolism, and the Ills of Society with Robert Lustig.)

So, due to fossil fuels, we have both obesity and nutrient deficiency. That paradox showed up, just like many other tendrils of the economic Superorganism, because our system optimized for what could be scaled and monetized: better yield, convenience, profit, and the supernormal palatability to our evolved taste buds.

That’s all backdrop for one of my key points today: I think AI is about to run a parallel dynamic on our cognitive lives, just as fossil fuels did on our physical lives.

Ultra-Processed Information

AI industrializes information production the same way heavy machinery and synthetic fertilizer industrialized food. It makes it cheap to produce something that feels like nourishment, tastes like better understanding, and also rewards our circuits that are craving certainty and novelty.

Cheap and abundant are about to come in spades, but the important and expensive parts do not automatically come along for the ride. Measurement, sourcing, expertise, and accountability – these are the things that tether words to our world, and to reality.

So, continuing a trend that started with the Internet and was boosted by social media, we now risk becoming information-rich and wisdom-poor – on steroids – with AI and large language models. We risk becoming mentally full with so much noise, while still feeling (and actually being) undernourished from lack of real signal.

We might call this “ultra-processed information.”

I think that phrase matters because it points at underlying incentives – a lot of what will flood our inboxes will be engineered for engagement and virality, not for truth or better orientation. It will be built to be clickable, shareable, and emotionally activating. Unfortunately, it will also often be very coherent and persuasive.

The Bliss Point

Taking it one step further, just like the biggest food manufacturers found something called the bliss point, the attention economy is going to run on the same optimization.

Food is optimized with just-right ratios of salt, sugar, and fat. It’s very plausible a lot of AI content is going to be optimized for the perfect blend of novelty, polarization, and righteousness to keep us engaged and coming back for more. So, the coming deluge of content is not going to be accidentally addictive – it is actually by design.

In the physical world, fossil energy gave us armies of machine labor at immense scale. Resultingly, it made our lives easier in many ways and created conditions where our bodies could gradually drift toward being overfed and undernourished. On top of that, they freed us from much of the physical labor that kept us naturally active for thousands of years, leading to the sedentary lifestyles many of us live today. That one-two punch dynamic compounded the damage of calorie-rich, nutrient-poor food, and now we’re building armies of digital cognitive laborers that will introduce a rhyming vulnerability to the sedentary mind.

When AI armies handle the research, the synthesis, and the writing of content, the cognitive muscles that used to be required for all these things begin to atrophy. Zak Stein, Nora Bateson, and I talked about this in Reality Roundtable #20: Hacking Human Attachment: The Loneliness Crisis, Cognitive Atrophy, and Other Personal Dangers of AI.

I think this, combined with being overfed with ultra-processed information, makes it easier for our minds to become disoriented – perhaps so disoriented we might feel lost. It’s the same meta-pattern from the economic Superorganism, now with a different substrate. Not physical machines this time, but cognitive ones.

Cognitive Weight Loss

Some of you might be drawing a parallel thread to the recent rise of the weight loss drug GLP-1 and all of its brand names. In the physical world, when our obesity crisis became undeniable, we didn’t fix the food system. We overrode it with a pharmaceutical appetite suppressant, at scale with enormous profit, arguably involving some of the same entities who had a hand in creating the broader chronic health crisis. They didn’t fix the problem, they managed the symptoms.

So, what might the cognitive GLP-1 be?

Well, if we follow the logic of our physical system, it’s likely going to come from AI itself. An AI system designed to help humans suppress their craving response, slow their intake, and modulate the appetite that another AI deployment is exploiting – likely sold by the same company that created the problem.

I think the question becomes, do we want to wait for the cognitive GLP-1 equivalent, or should we be building the discipline now as individuals – and as a culture – while we’re still able to?

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Filters to Protect Your Attention

So what do we do with this rapidly changing world, which most of us didn’t sign up to participate in? None of us are going to be able to keep up with the high volume of information on the Internet, let alone fact check it. So I humbly suggest we need some sort of a first-pass discipline, something we can run quickly in real time before we let a piece of content reshape our worldview or our nervous system. It’s simpler than it sounds. As a pre-filter, you can ask yourself, “Do I want to enter this current at all today? Do I actually need to swim in this right now?”

I think one of the most underrated skills in the coming years is going to be the ability to say no – to step onto the bank for a while and not swim. This is all about protecting your attention, because we’re going to need cognitive discipline as well as caloric discipline. In an upcoming piece, I’m going to talk about agency, and this filter is part of what I mean by that.

If you do choose to swim in the information sea, which most of us do because we’re part of society and want to be in the flow of information about our rapidly changing world, here are three questions (or filters) that have been helping me lately:

1. Is it true?

2. Is it relevant?

3. Is it useful?

The first filter is about contact with reality. In an AI world, we will get plausibility, polish, and confidence on demand, but what stays expensive is the accuracy, nuance, and tether to reality.

So, when I see a claim that activates me, especially when it makes me feel righteous, afraid, or more certain than I already was, I try to slow down just enough so I can ask, “Can I trace this back to something real? Is there a primary source here that’s somewhat legitimate? Is there data? And is there an institution or person with an actual reputation that has been helped or hurt by this information?”

If I can’t answer or trace it quickly, I don’t necessarily reject the information, I just put a big handicap on it by treating it as unverified so I don’t pass it on or build on it.

The second filter for this deluge of information is relevance. Even a true statement could become noise for you or the world. As my friends Aza Raskin (TGS #22: AI, The Shape of Language, and Earth’s Species) and Tristan Harris (TGS #16: Social Media: Bringing the Ring to Mordor) have long said, attention will increasingly be the scarce resource, particularly in a media environment where the volume of content is going to explode. If you spend your attention on things that don’t change your decisions, your priorities, or your understanding of what’s going on in the world, you can end up both more informed and less effective at the same time. So relevance really means asking, “Does this deepen your real understanding or change the picture of what is actually shaping your life and your community? Does it change what you think is likely? Does it change what you think you should do next?”

If it doesn’t, it might still be interesting or entertaining. But those are different things than nourishment, and at the crest of the Carbon Pulse I think time is one of our most critical and depleting assets. These are the questions we’ll have to ask ourselves when we’re flooded with noise.

That leads me to the third question, which regards usefulness. I mean that in the sense of orientation to the unfolding more-than-human predicament. Useful information improves judgment – it helps us see trade-offs and questions more clearly, and it might help us act with a little more wisdom under the constraints we’re increasingly going to face.

Sometimes usefulness is very tiny and very local. It could mean a blocker against amplifying anger or polarization, or maybe taking a step closer to improving your relationships, your household resilience, or your local place. A piece of content on the internet can be both true and relevant but still fail this third filter if it primarily agitates you, polarizes you, or trains you to perform and express certainty without actually making you more capable on the things that matter.

These are things I’m trying to be more aware of as I stare at what I think is coming. I’m really starting to fear for our epistemic commons – what we share and believe is true so we can have collective conversations.

I think these three simple filters are about how to achieve the mental equivalent of nourishment in an information environment that is going to be increasingly engineered for large-scale virality and attention.

Returning to the food systems analogy briefly, in an environment full of ultra-processed options, some dietary discipline becomes necessary if you want to be healthy. I say this as someone who is personally navigating a restricted diet right now: those impulses are hard to overcome. And the parallel is not lost on me with the cognitive laborers that are about to be cheap, abundant, and everywhere.

But similarly – actually extremely similarly – in an information environment full of ultra-processed content, some cognitive discipline is going to become necessary if we want to stay oriented and sane. I’m going to talk about agency and the meta-crisis in an upcoming post, but with respect to AI and the coming dwarfing of signal by noise, I think personal practices still matter. Maybe they even become paramount because each of us chooses what we ingest in this growing ocean of information – and each of us chooses what we pass along to other people. Those choices compound in our culture via conversations and discourse.

In a world where words are about to become incredibly cheap, our careful attention might just become an expression of our ethics.

Thanks for reading, I will talk to you soon.

Hope you all are well.

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