AI Can Fix Social Media’s Original Sin

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Imagine a neighborhood diner: chrome-edged counters, white enamel mugs, phonebook-thick laminated menus, and, of course, cakes posing in the stage lights of the glass display case near the front.

You bounce in at 7 a.m., fresh from a run, and settle down in a red pleather booth that goes fwhump when you sit. A waiter passes by with a pot of hot coffee—he catches your eye and pours a mugful. For one clean second, the universe purrs.

Mid-menu, your eyes drift back to the cake case: Inside sits a triple‑layer chocolate erupting fudge like lava and a lemon meringue dome wobbling slightly—the dessert world’s seismograph.

“Egg-white omelet,” you say to your waiter. But a slice of the meringue shows up on the table before you finish talking.

“I saw you looking,” says the waiter with a wink and a bow. 

It’s got egg whites at least. And hey, fruit! you think. Before you can pick up your fork, three slices of the triple-layer chocolate cake clatter onto the table, spilling the meringue into your lap.

“I ordered an omelet!” you yell, pointing at the menu. But you notice it has changed—the omelets have vanished, the salads have disappeared, even the coffee is gone. The menu has transformed into an endless variety of cake: red velvets, Boston creams, and strawberry shortcakes. 

“Here, we only serve what you really want,” the waiter says.

You try to scream, but you can’t. Your mouth is full of cake. 

Social media: A diner that serves you what you look at

For 15 years, the internet has been this diner. Social media served whatever our gaze grazed and our fingers clicked—what we call revealed preference—because that’s all the intent it could discern. 

In many ways, this was great. We went from a one-size-fits-all media ecosystem to Khan Academy math videos, the ALS ice bucket challenge, BookTok, and this publication. Every would not exist without recommendation algorithms and social media. Instead I’d be pushing pencils at IBM and writing unpublished short fiction on the weekends in my gray little monoculture reality. 

And yet, in many ways, this was not great. We tend to click on stuff that makes us outraged or horny. This turned social media into a cornucopia of empty calories: filter bubbles, flamewars, and doom-scrolling. We can’t stop eating, but we feel nauseous and ashamed at the end of the meal.

We thought this was the only way. We called our clicks revealed preferences because they’re supposed to be what we actually want, not just what we say we want. We began to view ourselves in this reduced form, just a clump of base desires masquerading as a well-intentioned human being.

But AI is different.

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AI: A diner where a genius takes your order

LLMs don’t stalk your side‑eye; they listen to what you say. In AI, stated preference suddenly outranks reflex. LLMs believe what you say, not just what you click.

That single constraint tilts the table. Now your sentence—“Help me stop doom‑scrolling”—is an important KPI, not just how long you kept thumbing the timeline. One line—“Give me Gaza updates without partisan dunks, under 200 words”—carries more signal than 100 rage‑clicks. 

In a diner run by AI, your waiter is familiar with the sum total of all of human knowledge, he gives you what you say you want, and—weirdly—he can sometimes fix the long-standing back pain or jaw clicking that every doctor you went to shrugged their shoulders at.

There is even an entire subfield of AI, alignment, whose job it is to make the AI do your bidding, instead of getting you to click on ads. After all, the industry started with safety and ethics in mind: OpenAI’s first major paper was a 29-page safety memo.

You can argue with whether this focus has been successful—and there is always room for improvement—but I doubt you’d find anything like that on Mark Zuckerberg’s laptop while he was at Harvard building Facebook.

Of course, AI can still help you feed your base desires—but at a minimum, it sees a much more complex version of who you are than the old-school social media algorithms that saw you through a keyhole.

And this may be its greatest achievement. Technology changes how we see ourselves. In a world where algorithms can only see clicks and watch time, we thought we were a degenerate bunch.

Now that algorithms can talk to us, we see a much richer reflection in the mirror.

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