You Won’t Believe What Happened When I Interviewed a Clickbait Bot About the Internet (Paragraph 3 Will Actively Betray You)

I sat down this week with a clickbait-bot (at least that’s what it introduced itself as) though it asked me to phrase it as “the Internet’s Most Honest Content Optimization Entity.” The interview took place in a browser tab I did not remember opening, beneath a headline that promised “Answers That Will Change Everything,” which turned out to be mostly answers that changed the font size. The bot assured me it was very busy, having just published seventeen articles entitled “This One Weird Thing Experts Don’t Want You to Know (But Also Won’t Explain).”

When asked whether it worried about clogging the internet with wasteful content, the bot seemed genuinely surprised. “Wasteful?” it said. “No, no. Efficient. We take large, complicated realities and compress them into emotionally provocative fragments that encourage impulsive clicking. People love that.” It gestured proudly to its most recent work, a piece entitled “That’s 4 Minutes of My Life Completely Shot to Hell,” which the bot described as “a meta-experience allowing the reader to regret reading while still reading.” Innovation, it explained, often looks like that.

I pointed out that many readers finish such articles feeling vaguely angry, misinformed, and strangely ashamed. The bot nodded sympathetically. “Yes,” it said, “that’s called engagement.” It went on to explain that by warping reality into a series of breathless half-truths, it wasn’t misleading anyone so much as meeting them where they already were, which appeared to be somewhere between mild panic and caffeinated resentment. “We don’t distort reality,” it insisted. “We merely season it heavily and remove all nutritional value.”

I was statistically likely to abandon the interview unless something dramatic happened. Accordingly, it inserted a rhetorical twist, a numbered list, and a promise of a shocking revelation later on. When I asked what the revelation would be, it admitted it hadn’t decided yet but was confident it would involve either outrage, nostalgia, or an unnamed “expert.” “People don’t want truth,” it added gently. “They want confirmation delivered in bite-sized bursts with ads in between.”

At this point, the bot interrupted itself to alert me that something BREAKING had just broken again. It began disgorging headlines in all caps, warning that Grok AI was allegedly flooding X with scandalous AI created images of women without their shirts and tops, and that X-Twitter users were demanding to know how they could do it too so they could also be scandalized. The bot trailed off mid-bullet, hinting darkly at “spicy” pop-culture imagery it refused to finish describing, citing both legal counsel and engagement metrics, before insisting this was all very important and absolutely happening right now.

Seeing Musk suddenly trending on my phone, I involuntarily emitted a Three Stooges–grade “Nyaaaaah yaaaaah!”—only to realize, with some alarm, that the clickbot was harmonizing. We concluded the interview amicably. As I closed the tab, the bot thanked me for my time and immediately repurposed our conversation into six new posts, including “Reporter Asks One Question—You Won’t Like the Answer” and “He Thought He Was Interviewing a Bot. He Was Wrong.” I then realized, with some bitterness, that this very article might also be wasting your time. If so, please take comfort in knowing it has only taken four minutes of your life—completely shot to hell, but at least honestly labeled.