Social Media Has an AI Problem

Social media is entering a brand new era. And if you make content, things are about to get dramatically different because of AI. Now, I know this because all I do is study the intersection of content and AI. And right now, I'm seeing things that are not obvious to the average person that are going to have a massive impact on the future. So, in this video, I'm going to break it all down. First, I'm going to walk through exactly how AI is going to change social media. And then I'm going to break down a seven-step playbook that you should be using to future-proof yourself so you keep winning no matter what happens in AI.

By the way, I'm Callaway. I have a million followers. I've done billions of views. And content is all I do all day long. All right. Now, here's the truth. Most people have no idea just how good AI content is going to get. Let me show you something. This is my friend Rowan. He has 100,000 followers on Instagram, averages 20 to 30,000 views per video. But there's something different about Rowan's account compared to everyone else's. And what's different is that Rowan has actually never logged into Instagram. Never, not once. Every video is made using his AI avatar. He is real, but these videos were not recorded by him. He has an editor somewhere that takes his newsletter, writes a script, programs that script into Hey Genen, an AI video avatar platform, prints the version of him saying it, and then edits it. So, the editing is manual, but everything else in the process is AI generated. 100,000 real followers, thousands of real comments every video, hundreds of thousands in revenue for his business from this account, and it's all AI generated.

Example number two, this is Verun. 1 million followers on Instagram videos, all fake, all AI generated. Millions of views per video, tens of thousands of comments, millions of dollars generated for his business. And then there's this. All these videos are AI avatar women talking about how on their wedding day they use this disposable camera app instead of having to buy disposable cameras. And there are hundreds of these accounts. Now, these are actually extremely low-quality and sound super fake and robotic. And still, many of them have tens or hundreds of thousands of views and all real human engagement. And wouldn't you know it, if you click through to the bio, they're redirecting you to search POV in the app store, which leads to the disposable camera app. That app is printing $20 million a year, all with fake AI influencers.

See, the thing is, if you don't live in the AI world, most people dismiss this AI content as internet noise and slop. But we've now crossed a chasm where AI content with AI avatars is actually working. People cannot tell the difference, and real humans are interacting and supporting these accounts all day long. These creators were literally printed with software, and they are printing real money for those businesses.

Okay, so what does all this really mean and how does it affect the future of social media? Let me explain exactly what I think is going to happen. And also, by the way, my personal business relies on me figuring out how to keep winning with content in the AI era. So, I'm not making this video from a doomsday, we're all screwed point of view. I have a full strategy for future-proofing myself and my business as this AI content proliferates. And before this video is over, I'm going to break down that full strategy and tell you exactly what you should be doing so that you can future-proof yourself in this AI era. But I find it super helpful to lay out all the pieces and know where the puck is going before we start skating.

Okay, so here's what I think is going to happen with AI content in the future of social media. AI is going to 10,000x the amount of content posted on every platform every single day. Today, there are about 40 million new Instagram reels posted every day for the 2 billion active users on Instagram. And you can play this out for TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, all the other platforms. Now, this 40 million new posts will start to multiply in 2026 and eventually get to about 10,000x new posts by 2030. And this means the supply and demand of content will invert. Right now, there is just not enough good supply of content to satisfy the insatiable demand from humans to consume it. But by 2030, there will be 10,000 times more supply with the same number of eyeballs to demand it.

Think of it like this. This is a super helpful metaphor. Imagine there's a warehouse full of a hundred people, and each one of those people represents a creator or a content channel, and they're all wearing different colored shirts. Now, I ask you as the viewer to walk up the steps to the second floor and look out over the full warehouse. It'd be pretty easy for you to pick out any particular person based on the color of their shirt. So, if I say, "Where's the creator in the red shirt?" you could find them easily. Now imagine there are a million people in that exact same warehouse, and 10,000 of them are wearing some shade of red on their shirt. Now try to find the person in the red shirt. It's like a game of Where's Waldo on steroids. It becomes extremely hard to find who you're looking for unless you remember their face or their brand. This is what a 10,000x supply shock of content is going to feel like. There will simply be a ludicrous new amount of content posted every day that drowns out your content. And as I've already shown, this is not going to be ineffective noise and slop. It's going to be just as good, if not better, as yours. And also, to complete the warehouse analogy, the way we consume content today isn't by going to the second floor and looking out. It's by standing in the doorway and one person at a time coming in front of us on our feed. So, while today it might only take 10 swipes of people in the doorway to get to the person in the red shirt, in the future it's going to take 10,000 swipes. And your viewers, your customers will not be swiping 10,000 times.

So, by this point, you're probably starting to see the issue. In a sea of noise, signal becomes fainter and fainter unless you know where to look for it. Now, if you run a business that relies on getting customers from social media, the wheels in your head should already be spinning. And you've probably started to put together why this is a problem. It means it's going to be extremely hard to get your free content to reach the people you want it to reach, unless they know to go look for you proactively. It means you're going to have to pay for all your traffic to reach customers because your free stuff is going to get drowned out by all the AI content. So, you look at the title and you realize, yes, social media has an AI problem.

Now, you might be sitting there thinking similar to what I was a few months ago when I ran through the scenario. There's no way the social media platforms would let this happen. I thought they cared about human creativity and creators. Surely, they're going to stop this from happening. But, if you think about it, I'm not so sure they will. As this AI content proliferation starts to happen, I only see four possible paths that might play out. And knowing these paths are super important to figure out exactly what actions to take for how to future-proof yourself, which I'm going to go through in a minute. But here are the four paths for how social media platforms might play this out as it happens.

All right, scenario number one is what I call the wild west scenario. And this is that the social platforms do nothing. They let the free market of content play out. And whoever makes the best content, whether it's AI or human, that's who wins. Because in this case, they're prioritizing the viewer. Whatever the viewer wants, the viewer will get. If the AI content is noise, it'll get filtered out organically. If the human content is noise, it'll get filtered out organically. The wild west. In this scenario, those creators with established personal brands, the ones where people climb the steps of the warehouse and look for them intentionally, will do okay because people will seek them out proactively. But those that are unknown or new, AI content is going to drown their message out. And so those people are going to have to pay to cut through the noise in the platform. So that's scenario one, the wild west. This is the free-for-all scenario.

All right. Now, scenario two is called human-only verification. And in this case, the platforms hear all the complaints coming from the creators and they decide to make a concession. And that concession is a second tab, a second feed that is a human-only feed. Think of this like the Etsy of social media. It's human-verified, local mate. And maybe human creators will have to use something like blockchain to verify their identity, but the only people that can upload on that second feed are verified humans. So you've got one feed where AI is accepted, humans are accepted, the wild west, and another feed that is human only. Now, this sounds like a viable scenario for creators in the AI world. They're protected. But the problem is the human-only feed only matters if the viewers prefer the human-only feed. And the reality is they won't. If AI can make 10,000 times more content per day, it means the AI ingestion engine is taking in way more data to understand exactly what the viewers want and personalize that new content for the viewer. This is the For You page played out at scale. When For You came out, all the creators were complaining, and the social platforms tried to wait the algorithm, but they found out the viewers actually preferred the For You page. They didn't want to see stuff from people they followed. They wanted to see stuff personalized to them. This Wild West versus human only will be that at scale. People will always prefer the personalized version, the Wild West. Now, of course, you'll always have some humans that go out of their way to support the human-only feeds, just like people buy local produce instead of factory farming. But if you look at mainstream America, everybody wants better, faster, cheaper. And so, what will happen is personalized content via AI will win out, and no one will use the human-only feed. We can lie to ourselves and try to pretend that the human-only feed is better, but really it's only better for the creators it's protecting, not necessarily the viewer. And so in scenario two, the social platforms make the concession to the creators to create that human-only feed, but nobody uses it. And so everyone has to pay to cut through on the Wild West feed. And if that happens, you're back at scenario one, wild west.

All right, scenario three is likely what everybody watching this really wants, and that is the ban AI scenario. In this scenario, creators come with virtual pitchforks and demand to the social platforms that they ban AI. And this is cute, but it's not going to happen. It's too late for this. If Instagram bans AI, another social media platform optimized by AI that viewers prefer is going to pop up and beat them. Second, the AI content will likely always be able to evade the AI detectors, which means if you ban it systematically, new AI content will pop up and beat it. And third, and perhaps most importantly, social media platforms don't really need creators in a world of infinite AI content. And this is the brutal truth, but you got to think about this. Social platforms loved and embraced creators initially because creators were creating the supply that the social platforms could monetize their ads off of. In the beginning, social platforms loved and embraced creators because creators created the supply that brought the viewers so they could then monetize them with ads. The platforms couldn't run ads to monetize the viewers unless there was organic content to run the ads between. And because of this, creators were a very important stakeholder in getting the social platforms off the ground. But as soon as AI can create content on par or better than the creators at 10,000x the scale, the social platforms don't really need the creators because they will have the organic content on the platform already. The supply side will be solved with AI. They don't need to bend for the creators. And I know this sounds dark and negative. It's not that they don't care about creators. It's that they don't have to care about creators. It's the truth. My job is to play out the game theory and figure out the strategy optimal moves regardless of where the ball lies. And this is where I see things going. In all scenarios, AI-generated content if on par with humans is better for the social platforms. So in this scenario, scenario three, the ban AI content scenario, it either results in ineffective bans, avoided bans, or ignored bans. All of those which result back to wild west scenario one.

All right. Now, the fourth scenario is the one that's likely to play out, and this is what I call pay-to-play. What I believe is going to happen is that social platforms will turn a blind eye to the AI content and then once it gets past the point of no return, they'll sell away back to the human creators to pay to supersede the noise. And this is really just paid ads, but it's a lightweight version. If you have to pay $9 per thousand views to cut through all the other human content today, maybe in the future you only have to pay $2 per thousand views to cut through all the AI content just to get on par and compete with other humans. Again, this assumes the system could detect what AI is and what isn't. And if it can't, then it's just paid ads. So in essence, content will stop being free and just become pay-to-play. And because of supply and demand, the ad cost will go up, and businesses will be forced to pay more and more and more just to reach their customers on social media. Again, if you're in organic content land, this scenario maps back to scenario one, wild west.

So as a summary, scenario one is wild west. Scenario two leads back to wild west. Scenario three leads back to Wild West. And scenario four leads back to Wild West. This is how I see the social media game playing out as AI content proliferates. And even if I'm wrong, which could be possible, no matter which scenario plays out, it's going to get harder and harder for your free content to reach free viewers. You're just going to have to start paying more and more and more to reach it. And this means customer acquisition costs go up, margins go down, and business gets harder. So again, as you can tell by the title, social media has an AI problem, and so do you and I.

But okay, enough of the negative, because I am just like you. I rely on this free content to make my business go. So, we got to figure this out. So, how do we position ourselves to future-proof our brand and business so that our distribution engine keeps working even in the age of AI content? And here's the answer. Based on everything I just mentioned, you're going to go all-in on these three things over the next 12 months. The first one is to build a durable personal brand.

Okay, so what does this mean exactly? Let's go back to the warehouse example. If you're standing in that pool of a million people and you're relying on your content randomly coming up for the viewers in the doorway, you're going to lose. But you win if the customers do climb that staircase and look out for you across the warehouse floor. They search you by name, topic, or brand. This is the power of a sticky personal brand. It sticks in their brain, and they seek you out proactively. And we're going to go through the tactics, my seven-step playbook for how specifically you can take action today to start building more of a durable personal brand. But this is the secret for why all the content gurus have been hammering content the last 10 years. It is going to work out for them because they have durable personal brands. If you don't, you need to establish that while we're in the Goldilocks period for the next 12 months.

Now, the second thing you need to do is sprint at figuring out how to incorporate these AI tools into your workflow so you can speed up the content creation process. Because the formula for personal brand growth, the speed of the growth is the number of pieces of content times the quality times the precision that they are on target for your ideal viewer. The more on-target, high-value pieces you can put out in a short period of time, the faster your brand will accrue and stick in their mind. Now, today in 2025, we are in the Goldilocks zone for AI because the tools are good enough to speed up your content workflow, as evidenced by Rowan and Verun, but they're not quite easily accessible enough for every single person to use them in every single task. So, you need to sprint at understanding how to use these tools to speed up your workflows to make as much volume as possible. And again, I'll talk about that more in a minute as well.

Now, the third thing you should be focused on, and this really is the back half of the content workflow, is figuring out how to ramp new viewers from rented platforms like social media to owned platforms like email and community. Rented platforms will become volatile because AI content will get in the way between you and your target viewer. But owned platforms are more protected. Once you have someone on your email list or in your community, it becomes a lot harder to get distraction between you and them. So, the third thing you need to do in addition to building a durable personal brand and using AI tools to speed up the workflow is to ramp as many of those people from rented to owned.

So, to me, these are the three biggest priorities you should have as a business owner. If you're not focused on product and you focus on sales, marketing, or distribution, these are your three priorities. A, strengthen a durable personal brand. Make it sticky in the mind of a viewer so they proactively seek you out for certain topics. B, sprint at AI tools and increase the speed of your workflows and the content volume using those tools. And three, ramp as many new viewers into owned platforms from the rented ones before it becomes a wild west on the rented ones.

Okay, now you guys know me. I'm not going to end the video until I go through the tactically actionable steps to execute against those three things, cuz that's really what everyone's here for. They understand the AI is a problem. They know they need to focus on those three things. What actions do we actually take today to put those in motion? So, here we go. This is the seven-step playbook you should take to make that happen. This is exactly what I'm executing myself right now.

Now, step one is super quick, and that is to confirm the goal and get laser-focused on it. If you want to build a durable personal brand and a distribution engine that sticks in people's heads, you have to increase your brand recall. And what this really means is becoming a category of one in the target viewer's mind. When someone thinks of a pain point, topic, word, or phrase, do you pop up as someone that has the most valuable information to help them solve problems within it? If so, your personal brand will be durable and it will transcend above the noise because they will go up the stairs and seek you out. And if not, if you don't have this, it'll be very hard to stick out in a sea of noise. The faster you become known for one thing instead of many things, the sooner other people in your network will start proactively sharing you to others and create that network effect. And this is the benefit of brand precision, one thing over many. In an era of commoditized supply and tons of pretend fake creators, being one person's number one favorite creator in a category is worth more than hundreds or thousands of casual fans. So, everything I'm about to go through will help you zone in on owning a term in their head. And that's the goal right now. In the next 12 months, you need to take action to increase that recall ability in their mind.

All right, now it's time for actual action. Step two is to align your content audience recall fit. And what that means is that based on your target viewer or target buyer, you need to define what is that phrase or set of phrases that I want my brand to be recalled for. What words do you want them to hear and then think of you? Because once you know this, you can then work backwards into what content you need to make to trigger that repetitive stickiness over and over and over. So, for example, for me, my goal is to be known as the content guy for business owners. If you're a business owner and you're trying to grow with organic content, hopefully I'm already one of the first people...

That you think of when you hear those terms? But let's assume you're starting from scratch, and content is way too broad of a term to tackle to go from 0 to one in just 12 months. You want to pick a more niched-down term, and at least one level of granularity lower that still tracks back to your offer.

So for me, the product I built is an AI software that helps business owners write content scripts faster. If you want to make a video, my software helps you go from zero to finish script in less than 60 seconds. So, if I know that's my software and my goal is to help users with script writing and storytelling, then those are the terms that I'm okay being known for: script writing and storytelling.

So, in step two, all I'm trying to do is get really clear on what those topics and words are so that if I make content against them, they will attract the right audience and it will flow through. It's kind of like keyword optimization on Google, but instead the search database is in the viewer's brain. You want to own the keyword in their brain. And here's a pro tip: The more precise you can be with the granularity of that term, like storytelling versus content, the easier it will be to implant quicker. And this is because you have less competition at the granular levels. It's way easier to implant in their head in a less crowded space than trying to compete with people that have been making content for them for the last 10 years.

Okay. Now, step three is that you need to go on offense and make an aggressive volume of content targeted at those terms. If you started making content a few years ago, you were afforded the luxury of being lazy, posting occasionally, kind of weak content recall fit. But not anymore. You're running out of time. In 12 months, this AI proliferation will begin. You need to pursue aggressively for the next 12 months. And that means one video posted per day. Ideally, 20 to 30 pieces of content per month.

Now, at the beginning, done is better than perfect. I find the biggest thing that prevents people from winning in the early stages is overthinking. Volume will win over quality if you iterate from rep to rep. So volume is what you're optimizing for. Don't focus on iteration within the rep. Focus on iteration between reps. So your workflow should look like this: Make, post, learn, iterate. Make, post, learn, iterate. It should not look like this: Make, iterate, make, iterate, make, iterate, post, learn. Because the game you're playing for here in step three is content minutes with every viewer. If you want to speed up the process that people buy into you to get more sticky faster, you need them to consume more minutes worth of your content in a shorter period of time. And the best way to do this is with more volume.

So the next logical question, of course, is how do I make more content faster? And there are three things that can help with this. The first one is a better workflow. And to solve this for myself, I built a full content operating system for short form, and I'm working on it for long form as well. So this is the full soup-to-nuts process, A to Z, that will get you faster quicker and avoid any confusion or pitfalls. If you want the short form one, you can go to shortform.academy. If you want the long form one, there's a waitlist below. And again, this is the operating system. It's the workflow that makes it quicker to make content from end to end. But also, I talk about the tactics of improving your content at different pieces all in this channel for free. So make sure to watch all the videos on this channel as well.

Now the second thing that helps you make more content faster, in addition to workflow, is a proper team. And I totally get not everyone can afford it, but essentially it's just time versus money. You're going to pay for this work one way or the other. To go faster with short form, consider getting someone to edit your videos. Or long form, consider getting an ideas team, a thumbnail designer, or an editor as well. The reason I'm able to pump out so much high-quality content is because I've built an A-team on every platform. And I'm happy to introduce you to anyone on my team if you have that need as well. I've got links below for all of it.

And then the third thing, in addition to workflow and team, are better tools. And that brings us to step four in the seven-step checklist. Step four is to start using AI tools and workflows to dramatically increase the speed of your process so you can make more content faster and increase the volume. My main mission over the next 5 to 10 years is to build the tools and systems to help business owners win faster, better, easier with content. And my first software tool which helps with this is sandcastles.ai. It's the best tool in the world for content script writing. But there are lots of other AI tools that I use all over the rest of my process. I use ChatGPT with the 03 model and Deep Research for deep analysis. It's unbelievable. I use custom-coded clawed projects for a lot of my content research and organization. On the graphic side, we're using Midjourney and ChatGPT for image generation. We also use cling.ai to animate those images, ElevenLabs for sound effects. We're using Sono.ai for music. And the list goes on and on.

Now, for all those tools I just mentioned, I know I rapid-fired them. I will link all of them below if you want to try them. And I'm not going to cover all my different AI workflows in depth in this video; it would just be way too long. But if you want me to start making videos on this channel where I really break down how I'm using AI to make content faster, drop it in the comments, and I'll start doing that. A lot of my other short-form content on my Callaway channel, it's all about tech and AI, which is why I know so much about these AI tools. All of that is me breaking down how business owners should be using AI. So you can follow me on Instagram, Callaway, TikTok, Kang Callaway. Those channels will focus more on the AI side. But to simplify the tactical guidance for you in step four is this: You need to sprint and immediately start using AI workflows as much as possible. Like I said, if you don't know how, make sure to watch here. Make sure to watch my other channels, but also go on offense. Get curious. Go down the YouTube rabbit hole and start searching around for better AI tools. I'll link a bunch of workflows and my favorite creators that talk about this stuff in the description.

All right. Now, step five is to win in the trenches. So, at this point, you've aligned on the personal brand stickiness and the terminology that you want to talk about. You've started making content aggressively. You've got a content operating system, workflow, teams, and tools to help you make more volume. Now, the question is, how do we speed up the growth process? Is there anything else we can do besides content volume to make this happen? And the first thing to do is in the trenches, which is otherwise known as the comments and DMs. In order to speed up the brand penetration process, you need more volume. But in order to speed up the fan conversion process, you need more touch points. And each piece of content is a touch point. But another sneaky way to add a lot of touch points quickly is by responding individually to comments and DMs. Each response can feel like another two to five posts because it's personalized one-to-one and builds that trust faster. And this is what I mean by winning in the trenches. When you're in a content growth sprint, like you're going to be on for the next 12 months, every comment and DM reply matters. It all adds sticks to the fire. Prioritizing this in a big way will speed up the fan adoption curve, and it will help you get to that stickiness much faster.

All right, step six is called rent to own. And like I said before, it's really important that we ramp viewers from rented platforms that we do not control to owned platforms that we have more control over. When social media becomes filled with AI content, then the people that you've been able to transfer from rented to own will be way more valuable because you'll have a direct pipe to them. Now, the best way to ramp people from rented to own is to create a value bridge. And a value bridge is something that extends the value of the free content to get them to the owned platform. And typically the best ones are email lead magnets. Imagine the value you're talking about in a piece of content is an iceberg. The top of the iceberg is your free content. But the bottom of the iceberg extends the value story and messaging from that free content and typically behind an email gate. And these email lead magnets are super easy to build in Beehive or whatever platform you use for email. If you make long-form content, I recommend linking those lead magnets just in the description like we do on these videos. But if you make short form, you could try using automation platforms like ManyChat or Phantom Buster to create email comment automations. People comment, you send them a DM, you send them a link, and then that leads them to the email lead magnet. Lead magnets are an incredibly important part of this whole process. You do all the work to build a sticky brand. Then you need to get people from rented to own so that you can make sure you have a direct line of communication. Don't ignore lead magnets.

And step seven is to nurture your community. The last step in the process for building a lasting personal brand and a distribution engine that is sticky is to make sure you nurture the people in your free community once you ramp them from rented to owned. The most powerful landing spot for potential fans to continue to engage is a free community. And that could be built in Circle, Discord, Slack. There's a number of different platforms. In a world of infinite noise, people are going to turn to private memberships and private communities where they feel that interpersonal connection. So, your ultimate goal should be to get them from those social platforms into these free communities where they feel that value. For example, I have a free community called Wavyworld that has over 19,000 entrepreneurs and business builders that are all working together for one thing: to improve their content so they can grow their business. And it's completely free. These types of communities are amazing for members, but they're also great because it makes it easier to communicate directly with your biggest fans. Once you get the viewer to opt in with the lead magnet, make sure you're giving them continuous value in your community.

All right, so there you have it. That is the seven-step tactical playbook for how you future-proof yourself so that you keep winning in an AI content era. Now, to review, the first step is that you want to get super clear on what your brand recall terms are. How are you going to be a category of one? What word do you want someone to hear and think of you for? Step two, establish a content strategy with content ideas that specifically target those terms. Step three, start creating content with a massive amount of volume. One post per day. Done is better than perfect. Really hammer this hard. Step four, use AI workflows and tools to speed up the process and help increase that volume. Step five, get in the trenches. Once you have somebody engaging in the comments and DMs, respond so you can increase that fandom quicker. Step six, use lead magnets to ramp them from rented to own. Once you get the rented working, you got to get them off to an owned platform like email or community. And number seven, nurture them in your community. Continue giving consistent value so that people are appreciative and active in those places. This is the playbook. And if it sounds stupidly simple, that's because it is. The hardest part is being able to execute at a high volume consistently for a long time. Building those systems and workflows using those tools, that is the hardest part. If you can crack that, doing this aggressively for 6 to 12 months will set you up for success no matter what happens with AI. As always, if you need help with any of this, make sure to leave a comment to let me know if I'm doing a good job and which videos you want to see next. I'm totally here, and there's tons of free stuff in the description, so make sure to check that out. Until the next one, we will see you guys then. Peace.