Shaper CollectiveInsights
Essays and reports on attention, AI and public affairs, written in Washington.
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LinkedIn
The Cure for AI Slop Is 25 Examples and Your Judgment [GUIDE]
From the Horizon Lines newsletter: how 25 good examples and your own judgment keep AI output from turning into slop.
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Essay
Generative Media is Still Finding its Format
Reflections from GenMedia on what becomes possible when anything can become media, and what it takes to make people care.
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Essay
Who Profits from the End of the World?
No, I don’t believe AI will destroy humanity. No, you shouldn’t assign a percentage to the apocalypse—“P(doom).” Yes, you should be asking who stands to benefit from your fear of “rogue AI.”
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Essay
The Backyard Problem
The data center backlash has officially reached the pee-jar stage. Jason Kelce spent Florida’s primary day walking through a field toward a data center, holding a jar of urine, pledging to “send your pee to the AI data center of your choice,” so facilities stop draining local water.
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Essay
Proof of Person
Social media is facing a classic supply and demand problem. AI lets users pump out more content, so platforms are pulling levers like AI detection and limiting reach so they can maintain revenue from advertising.
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Essay
Who’s Texting You?
The next time you get a political text from a “Sarah” or a “John,” there may be no human on the other end.
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Essay
So, Who Do I Vote For?
The New York Times went looking for voters who let AI help pick their candidates, and found them. Mia Taylor, staring down a Los Angeles County ballot with more dread than enthusiasm, photographed it and asked Claude, “So, who do I vote for here?”
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Report
How AI Chatbots Answer the Data Center Siting Fight
The data center siting fight is a local land-use battle over where developers can build large computing facilities. It also decides who pays for the power and water those facilities draw.
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Essay
Lean In or Lawyer Up
A U.S. Senate candidate got caught looking suspiciously swole in a birthday photo. Turns out, his consultant edited it with AI. Instead of issuing a denial, his team leaned in and posted their own AI parody video.
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Essay
The Spencer Pratt Cinematic Universe
AI-generated fan content is disrupting the LA mayoral election. By now, you’ve seen the AI-generated shorts about Spencer Pratt: Pratt as Batman in a burning Los Angeles, Karen Bass as the Joker at a Versailles banquet and Newsom as the Star Wars Emperor.
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Essay
The Meme Machine
Even though new models can create media indistinguishable from reality, realism isn’t the main story here. Remixing is. The entire visual language of internet culture is now in a production pipeline that costs very little to run.
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Essay
The Slow Takeoff
If you work on a computer, this is about you. Plus: Real videos rock politics while AI amplifies the story, the Epstein Files podcast, and more.
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Essay
Influence the Agent, Influence the Human
AI agents now have emails, wallets, and social media accounts. Influencing them looks a lot like influencing humans.
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Gravity Wells
AI concentrates wherever attention does. This week, it was Minneapolis.
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Essay
ChatGPT Gets Ads. Washington Gets a New Channel.
How ChatGPT Ads Could Make Grassroots Campaigns Conversational + Signals This Week
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Essay
The Changing Power Laws of Attention
A viral meme reposted by the White House reveals how AI has collapsed the cost of persuasion and rewritten the levers of attention in social media.
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Essay
The Quiet Arrival of the General Agent
2025's Biggest Breakthroughs and the Future of the Digital Public Square
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Essay
Light the Right Fires
A network of 150 accounts hijacked keywords around Keir Starmer during the UK election, flooding social platforms with AI-generated videos until they’d racked up billions of views.
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Essay
Dialogue at Scale Beats TV Ads. Now What?
Research published this week in Nature and Science shows AI chatbots replicate dialogue’s persuasive power at industrial scale. Conversational AI shifted opposition voters by 10 to 25 percentage points across three countries—outperforming television advertising through tailored back-and-forth exchange.
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Essay
The AI Policy Vacuum
Big Tech spent $50 million in nine months trying to kill state AI regulations. Steve Bannon is calling AI “the most dangerous technology in the history of mankind.” David Sacks says it’s the new space race. They’re both Republicans.
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Essay
The Chipmunk Problem
Associates at government affairs firms spend entire days watching congressional hearings, briefings and other video content on 2x speed where every member sounds like a chipmunk, just to pull out the sections that matter.
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Essay
Move Faster or Go Unheard
There’s a three-week problem in Washington, and I’m building the solution. Grassroots campaigns are effective but incredibly challenging to orchestrate. Mobilizing advocates on-message takes weeks.
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Essay
How Many Wheels on a Big Rig?
Coca-Cola just released their AI-generated holiday campaign. Again. After last year’s backlash, they doubled down. The “Holidays Are Coming” trucks are back, only this time every truck has a different number of wheels because consistency is apparently optional when you can produce in a month what used to take a year.
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Essay
After the Bottleneck Disappears
If you’ve been following the AI race long enough, you eventually stop watching for product releases and start thinking about the second order consequences of abundant intelligence.
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Essay
Trump’s AI Gambit Broke the Taboo. What Comes Next?
Mike Johnson stood at the podium and said it plainly: “The president uses social media to make a point. He is using satire to make a point.” He was defending an AI-generated video Trump posted showing himself dropping feces on protesters from a fighter jet.
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Essay
Forecasting AI’s First Real Election
AI labs love coming to Washington and talking about the future of work. But they’re careful not to talk too much about how AI changes our elections and opinion shaping efforts. That’s far less certain and can be, in some cases, far more contentious.
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Essay
The Congressional Inbox Crisis
This week I spoke to Jon Kokot, who’s building Civic after watching Congress drown in constituent communications that AI could actually resolve.
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Essay
Rounding Errors and the Stories We Tell
If the problem exists in language—and most of Washington’s problems do—you might now be able to solve it. In my feature below, I track a single request through a large language model to understand its weird features, like why the same question can get different answers.
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Essay
The Influence Model
When Colin Raby arrived on Capitol Hill as a “congressional AI specialist,” almost no one in his office touched ChatGPT. By the time he left, two-thirds of the staff used it daily.
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Essay
The Influence Model
Welcome to the first edition of The Influence Model, a weekly newsletter for Washington insiders about how AI is reshaping the practice of influence and policy persuasion.
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