Name: A.I. Slop Will Crescendo Into A Cultural Shift - Chris Hayes
Uploaded: 2026-01-08T17:16:27.000Z
Duration: 3 min 57 s
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We're back with the author of the Sirens Call, Chris Hayes.

I want to talk about your book, the Sirens Call, the New York Times bestseller.

It tackles a modern problem that I suffer from of tech companies extracting our attention for profit.

You know, the old saw of like, if you don't know what they're selling, they're selling you.

I would love to have the attention span to read a book of this length.

You said we're feeling a kind of rebellion last year, that breaking out against the dead end feeling that we have.

I think everywhere you look in the culture, there's this growing sense of alienation, which I think is a really correct term for the feeling we have that something that should be internal to us, that we control our attention, has been extracted from us and is now outside our control.

And that alienation is manifesting itself in a kind of rebellious spirit against the kind of tech overlords.

And particularly I think this term that has been coined, I think is so effective.

AI slope sure perfectly captures how people feel like that we're reduced to just pigs while they just like throw the buckets at us for us to like eat up.

And the Internet through AI, the Internet feeds on the Internet.

And so much of what you're seeing has already been pre digested.

I think again, it's early days of this and I think it will be a kind of epococcus cultural shift when it really crescendos, is a desire for the real and for the human and for the embodied and for the attended to.

And everywhere you look in the culture, you're feeling these emanations of it, even as we sit and we feel addicted to our phones and we fight the impulse.

There's only so long you can sell a product to people or give people a product that they have come to hate.

I don't have a brick, but do you know what I'm talking about?

Yeah, yeah, you can buy a product now that'll keep you from the part of your phone that they're harvesting your attention on.

Which is more evidence, I think, that people are waking up to the idea that we need help to fight against these people who are extracting our brains.

And the first moment of the book is the story of Odysseus about to set sail past the sirens who want to lure him with this beguiling song to his death and tying himself to the mast to resist the urges.

And that moment of volition, that moment of autonomy, that moment of reasserting your own will in the face of things that want to take it from you, that's the genesis of the book.

It's the genesis, I think, of that, of the product, the brick, and

I think the genesis of a cultural moment and a political moment that we're going to see only expand day after day, month after month, year after year.

His book the Sirens Call is out now in paperback.

We'll be right back with Natalie Portman and the Colbert questionnaire.