This evening I spent some time talking to the latest version of Claude about investment decisions, and the rationale behind various stock price movements. I also spent a bit of time browsing a bunch of of discord channels on servers I sometimes hang out on. I found the difference in information delivery to be extremely jarring.
I also, for some reason, occasionally spend time on the reddit ‘wallstbets’. It’s 95% bullshit, and 5% actual insight and analysis. As a result, I’m used to seeing a lot of typical 2026 one-liners, memes, in-jokes and random emojis and pop culture references, inter-spaersed with the odd bit of insightful financial analysis and modelling.
I do generally find most internet forums, reddits, social media threads and discords to be… kinda dumb and juvenile. Sometimes its what I want. An endless stream of star trek memes is exactly what I need sometimes, but in general I am more interested in in-depth analysis, and specifically, for analysis that presumes I am a) an adult and b) have an attention span. Any website that ‘warns’ me how many minutes it takes to read an article is an instant red flag for me. I am not a child, and am capable of sometimes reading entire books! Your article can be multiple pages. I will not expire out of frustration.
Enter AI
AI is perfect for me. I can ask claude a question about cocoa prices and it will respond with analysis. There will be no jokes, zingers, one-liners, memes or attempts to entertain me. If I then want information about the Strait of Hormuz and its impact on Korean financial firms, then it will provide me with detailed analysis of that too. If I want to dig deeper on the valuation model for specific Korean firms, it will do so. If I have supplementary questions about the leadership structure of that firm, it will research I and answer. If I ask for a comparison table of that firm with western firms in the same industry, or historical comparisons, it can do that too. In fact, if I want to spend the next 48 hours doing nothing but detailed research into the Korean banking industry, then Claude will provide, in as much depth as I can possibly stand.
The contrast with social media is staggering. On social media, you have maybe 128 characters to provide content. Thats trivial. On video sharing sites, you basically have a few seconds. It’s entertainment for the chronically distracted. A constant stream of unrelated trivial bullshit for people who have regressed to the point where even this paragraph would be considered an essay.
Until AI came along, I found the web just frustrating, distressing, pointless and deteriorating. It does not matter how many times you click on ‘show less of this’ on youtube shorts or facebook reels. Your opinion is not important. The social media giants have decreed that all media is SHORT, and if your attention span is longer than ‘BLAM’, then you are obviously a freak and your opinion does not count.
But now, people who actually want to read, or research have a new best friend. LLMs have no adverts (yet), no distractions, no memes, no emojis, no jokes, no one-liners, no clickbait headlines, no bullshit. It’s like wikipedia in human form. You can become as informed as you like, on any topic, in huge depth, any time, for a trivial subscription cost.
When I talk to Claude about investing, it’s MASSIVELY better than reading ANY financial news or analysis sites. Even the premium ones you pay subscriptions for. I ignore absolutely all ‘news’ articles about stocks, and go straight to Claude. I can actually ask questions and seek clarifications, and I get them, without a shit-ton of ‘editorial opinion’ or sponsored links. Its amazing. And as a result, my effectiveness as an investor is way higher.
Duplicate this to absolutely any field. You have people who it seems to me have just frankly ‘given up’ and regressed into the child-like dopamine hits of nothing but social media doom-scrolling (or happy-scrolling, just ingesting a thousand feel-good videos of cute animals is equally brain-rotting), and you have other people who are able to reject that and dig deep into whatever it is they want to know about.
We seem to be becoming a society straight out of science fiction, split into factions. Some people are leveraging AI to become hyper-informed and hyper-aware. Others are stuck on social media become hyper-desensitized and hyper-distracted. Essentially we have one technology that makes people super productive, and another making them super-useless. In some cases, the same companies provide both services.
Social Media, in it’s currently ‘blipvert’ form, feels to me like a damaging disease. It’s handing out tiny droplets of dopamine in return for selling us stuff and pretending its free. But the side-effect of this is an entire generation of people with a crumbling attention span, and frankly what also appears to be crumbling IQs. I firmly believe we need hard limits on social media. The ‘endless scrolling’ mechanic is like a marketing nuclear weapon, and the privacy destroying algorithms happy to feed us endless bullshit as long as we just click-click-click until we pass out make it worse. It’s insane we let this happen. There is an alternate universe where we went direct from wikipedia to modern LLMs, without all the hate-speech-disinformation-timewasting-bullshit that is twitter and instagram. A direct line from widespread information availability to a supercharged interactive teacher.
Granted, AI can make mistakes. Hallucinations are a thing (although in my experience, way less common in premium models), but anybody who thinks the content available in general on social media and the many news websites can be entirely relied upon is deluding themselves. I personally find AI to provide way more accurate information than reddit, social media, or any news site.
I massively support efforts in the EU to force social media algorithms to change. We have an opportunity here to ‘reset’ online life so it makes us smarter, not more stupid. Lets seize it. And lets also be more willing to embrace the positives of AI. All I ever hear is the negatives, but for people who are genuinely curious about the world, AI has the potential to be an expert teacher and research team on every topic, for everyone. That sounds awesome to me.