The kids’ show “Cocomelon” is known for its bright visuals and its monopolization of toddlers’ attention. What is less commonly discussed is the means by which it got there. It’s no coincidence the show is so successful — rather, that success is an algorithmically calculated outcome by its parent company, Moonbug Entertainment.
Moonbug’s London headquarters feel less like an animation studio and more like a wretched sort of laboratory for the infant mind. In their setup, producers placed toddlers — the subjects of their study — in front of two screens. One screen played episodes of “Cocomelon,” and one, aptly named the Distractron, played a continuous loop of mundane scenes from the terrible real world: a man pouring a cup of coffee and someone getting a haircut.
Whenever a child’s eyes drift away from the vibrant world of “Cocomelon” toward the Distractron, that movement is recorded as a failure of engagement. A note is made, a scene is cut, and the algorithm strikes again.
Using this data, the creators tweak the content so that the final version produced is the one that the greatest number of children watched for the greatest amount of time. Each element is subject to these calculations — the color of buses (yellow is optimal for engagement), the addition of details like Band-Aids (minor injuries do the trick for tots). Art is not produced in the pursuit of meaning, nor emotion, nor beauty — instead, it is optimized for attention held. The show leaves nothing to chance.
The franchise’s mission to attract the attention of the youngest generation paid off. Today, the “Cocomelon” YouTube channel boasts over 200 billion views and, at 200 million subscribers, is the third-largest creator on the site.
The success of “Cocomelon” is symptomatic of a broader issue: the slow creep of attention optimization via technology. Today, this is exemplified by ChatGPT and Gemini — eloquent, well-meaning chatbots that can dispense life advice one moment and spit out a submission-ready essay the next.
But we have been surrendering control of our consumption to intelligent technology our entire lives: when we open Netflix to the curated list of “Top Picks” and “Critically Acclaimed Bingeworthy TV Shows,” and select the most appealing combination of title and trailer, when we idly pick up our phones and revert to a muscle-memory-guided tap through the day’s Instagram stories. Just because this technology now talks back does not mean it is all new.
The New York Times recently published a quiz: “Who’s a Better Writer: Humans or AI?” The quiz pitted the works of Ursula K. Le Guin, Carl Sagan, and Cormac McCarthy, among others, against Anthropic’s Claude and Opus 4.5. The results were elucidating. For two passages, a clear majority of test-takers said they preferred the AI’s work: 57 percent preferred Claude to McCarthy, while 67 percent chose the AI over Carl Sagan.
What is striking about the work of the AI here is how it desires to mirror human tendencies. In her article “How to Tell if Something is AI-Written,” Hollis Robbins argues that the intentions of humans are what distinguish their writing from what we’d now term “slop.” While humans write from lived experience, connecting words to real-world “signifieds” such as a specific red chair or a box of donuts, AI can only manipulate textual patterns. It produces “slop” by using abstract buzzwords and “computational hedging” — phrases like the infamous “not only X but also Y” — to sound authoritative without ever committing to a mental image. Ultimately, AI creates writing that is smooth but hollow: flat and separated from the empathy and lived experience that define human connection.
There feels a uniquely human tendency towards excess in the AI science writing excerpt, the one juxtaposed against Carl Sagan’s work. The quotes “There is something astonishing in the fact that we are made of matter forged in dying stars…” and “The universe is not indifferent to us; we are made of it, continuous with it” struck me when I read them as creations that only a human could be responsible for. I clicked the “prefer” button on that excerpt enthusiastically — only to be met with a sense of failure and betrayal when the work turned out to be generated by an unknown, teeming mass of computers.
Human tendencies are what make art worth consuming. The best poem I’ve read recently is Ada Limón’s “The Russian River,” which depicts a version of adolescence that exists only in imagination or in memory — the “summer of our senior year of high school.” It felt particularly resonant for me, having grown up in Northern California not so far from where Ada Limón spent her own childhood and adolescence.
In the 1973 Ford LTD we took Highway Twelve
and headed toward the wild Russian River,
it was the summer of our final year of high school,
we were all so stoned that the world was perfectly defined
by goodness and realness and the opposite of those.
It was 98 degrees and even with the windows open
it was hard to breathe.
I read its opening lines and I feel back in my 11-year-old mind, looking toward my future as if it was a sort of promised land. I read it and I feel how I felt at 17, in that summer that Limón writes of, the photos in my camera roll shimmering and overexposed. I read it and I feel, essentially, human.
That’s what all great art does: present a version of humanity that makes your own feel more valuable. And that’s why I felt so acutely betrayed when I read that science excerpt and it turned out to be AI. I feared how effectively my perception of the world as beautiful — a perception that I believed to be discerning — could be imitated by an unthinking, unliving entity.
We talk a lot about the decline of “third spaces” — a term coined by Ray Oldenburg for places beyond the home (the first place) and the workplace (the second place) where people can gather freely and without barriers to entry. I believe a similar framework of space and its relation to our connections applies to media as well. At their best, common culture and media serve a similar function to “third spaces.” They provide a place to gather freely and experience human connection, if indirectly, and lay a groundwork for common experience.
Yet just as we have lost “third spaces” in reality, we have also lost them in media. Adam Aleksic, otherwise known as the Etymology Nerd on social media, described this phenomenon in an essay titled “the non-places of social media.” He says that on a broad scale, the “dissemination of information” has transitioned from an experience intimately tied to community and physical space to one in which we learn about the world from our own “deeply individualized” corners.
“The more we streamline our lives, the more our places turn into meaningless non-places — merely meant for you to pass through rather than connecting with yourself and others,” Aleksic wrote.
As technology has developed, our access to media has grown more atomized. When TV first became available in the 1930s, RCA only offered five channels for patrons to choose from; later on, Americans as a unit watched Walter Cronkite chronicle JFK’s assassination, the moon landing, and the progression of the Vietnam War. Now, though, our consumption is spread across so many platforms and venues that it is impossible to know what others are watching or why.
In the algorithm-ification of art, we risk sacrificing community at the altar of palatability. We have grown so accustomed to the content we know — the particular placement of our For You Pages beneath our thumbs — that we have no incentive to ever explore anything beyond. We have no incentive to find the community and shared experience with others that “third places” in media are meant to foster.
I wasn’t allowed to watch television until age 10; my cultural upbringing was wrought in Warrior Cats novels and stolen 10 p.m. viewings of CNN in my parents’ room. Imagine my surprise, then, when throughout my teenage years I discovered the magic of Pixar movies — their humor, their creativity, and, most importantly, their communication of cultural values. Inherent to the efficacy of this medium is the fact that it is shareable, meant to be watched and experienced communally. That’s the power of fiction, especially in television shows and movies. Few things compare to bearing witness to another’s experience.
I experienced this phenomenon in the first several weeks of college, as “The Summer I Turned Pretty” watch parties provided easy fodder for conversations regarding Belly’s frightful styling or Jeremiah’s questionable vocabulary. These shared frameworks, regardless of their quality, give us something to attach ourselves to. They give us something to absorb, something to relate to, and, ultimately, something to share. No matter how enlightening my Explore page may be, I can’t tell you anything about any of the reels I watch after an hour scrolling Instagram.
Our attention may continue to be monopolized by forces far outside of our control. That may never change. The pace of society may increase, and the dystopian business tactics of “Cocomelon” may grow only more mainstream. We may never again have full control — if we ever did — over what we consume and why we consume it.
But what matters most, I think, is recognizing that we as individuals can still be moved by art and its consequences. As our definition of art grows more estranged from the very humanity that first made it valuable, we should remember why, and how, art comes to matter. Reconnecting with the forces behind art and media may offer a refuge from the slop, banality, and broader cultural disarray. We should seek out community — and pursue it even and especially at the expense of our comfort.
Featured Image Source: Invaluable