The prompts read like tiny, abstract poems.

“A brutal storm off the coastal cliff. The clouds are formed into tubular formations and lightning strikes are never ending.”

I scroll; another appears:

“A male figure formed of gentle fire, his outline glowing with soft embers, approaches a female figure shaped from flowing water, her form glistening with ripples and fine mist. They move toward one another with calm grace, meeting in a warm embrace.”

The scenes come to life before my eyes in the form of AI-generated video. In the first clip, clumsy lightning cascades out of a cloud and moves across the water and into my feed. In the second, sexless, glowing people weep and hug in my timeline. The videos pop up instantly—before my brain has had time to picture the prompts using my own imagination, as if the act of dreaming has been rendered obsolete, inefficient.

I am experiencing Vibes, a new social network nested within the Meta AI app—except it’s devoid of any actual people. This is a place where users can create an account and ask the company’s large language model to illustrate their ideas. The resulting videos are then presented, seemingly at random, to others in a TikTok-style feed. (OpenAI’s more recent Sora 2 app is very similar.) The images are sleek and ultra-processed—a realer-than-real aesthetic that has become the house style of most generative AI art. Each video, on its own, is a digital curio, the value of which drops to zero after the initial view. In aggregate, they take on an overwhelming, almost narcotic effect. They are contextless, stupefying, and, most importantly, never-ending. Each successive clip is both effortlessly consumable and wholly unsatisfying.

I toggle over to a separate tab to see a post from President Donald Trump on his personal social network. It’s an AI video, posted on the day of the “No Kings” protests: The president, wearing a crown, fires up a fighter jet painted with the words King Trump. He hovers the plane over Times Square, at which point he dumps what appears to be liquid feces onto protesters crowding the streets below. The song “Danger Zone” by Kenny Loggins plays.

I switch tabs. On X, the official White House account has posted an AI image of Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance wearing crowns. A MAGA influencer has fallen for an AI-generated Turning Point USA Super Bowl halftime-show poster that lists “measles” among the performers and special guests. I encounter more AI videos.