Making Cash Off 'AI Slop': the Surreal Video Business Taking Over the Web (msn.com)
(Saturday August 23, 2025 @11:34AM (EditorDavid)
from the seeing-is-believing dept.)
- Reference: 0178833410
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/08/23/022223/making-cash-off-ai-slop-the-surreal-video-business-taking-over-the-web
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence/making-cash-off-ai-slop-the-surreal-video-business-taking-over-the-web/ar-AA1KJ8ek
The Washington Post looks at [1]the rise of low-effort, high-volume "AI slop" videos :
> The major social media platforms, scared of driving viewers away, have tried to crack down on slop accounts, using AI tools of their own to detect and flag videos they believe were synthetically made. YouTube last month [2]said it would demonetize creators for "inauthentic" and "mass-produced" content. But the systems are imperfect, and the creators can easily spin up new accounts — or just push their AI tools to pump out videos similar to the banned ones, dodging attempts to snuff them out.
One place where they're coming from...
> Jiaru Tang, a researcher at the Queensland University of Technology who recently interviewed creators in China, said AI video has become one of the hottest new income opportunities there for workers in the internet's underbelly, who previously made money writing fake news articles or running spam accounts. Many university students, stay-at-home moms and the recently unemployed now see AI video as a kind of gig work, like driving an Uber. The average small creator she interviewed did their day jobs and then, at night, "spent two to three hours making AI-slop money," she said. A few she spoke with made $2,000 to $3,000 a month at it.
But the article provides other examples of the "wild cottage industry of AI-video makers, enticed by the possibility of infinite creation for minimal work"
A 31-year-old loan officer in eastern Idaho first went viral in June "with an AI-generated video on TikTok in which a fake but lifelike old man talked about soiling himself. Within two weeks, he had used AI to pump out 91 more, mostly showing fake street interviews and jokes about fat people to an audience that has surged past 180,000 followers..." (He told the Post the videos earn him about $5,000 a month through TikTok's creator program.)
"To stand out, some creators have built AI-generated influencers with lives a viewer can follow along. 'Why does everybody think I'm AI? ... I'm a human being, just like you guys,' says the AI woman in one since-removed TikTok video, which was watched more than 1 million times."
One AI-generated video a dog biting a woman's face off (revealing a salad) received a quarter of a billion views.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence/making-cash-off-ai-slop-the-surreal-video-business-taking-over-the-web/ar-AA1KJ8ek
[2] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/356734251
> The major social media platforms, scared of driving viewers away, have tried to crack down on slop accounts, using AI tools of their own to detect and flag videos they believe were synthetically made. YouTube last month [2]said it would demonetize creators for "inauthentic" and "mass-produced" content. But the systems are imperfect, and the creators can easily spin up new accounts — or just push their AI tools to pump out videos similar to the banned ones, dodging attempts to snuff them out.
One place where they're coming from...
> Jiaru Tang, a researcher at the Queensland University of Technology who recently interviewed creators in China, said AI video has become one of the hottest new income opportunities there for workers in the internet's underbelly, who previously made money writing fake news articles or running spam accounts. Many university students, stay-at-home moms and the recently unemployed now see AI video as a kind of gig work, like driving an Uber. The average small creator she interviewed did their day jobs and then, at night, "spent two to three hours making AI-slop money," she said. A few she spoke with made $2,000 to $3,000 a month at it.
But the article provides other examples of the "wild cottage industry of AI-video makers, enticed by the possibility of infinite creation for minimal work"
A 31-year-old loan officer in eastern Idaho first went viral in June "with an AI-generated video on TikTok in which a fake but lifelike old man talked about soiling himself. Within two weeks, he had used AI to pump out 91 more, mostly showing fake street interviews and jokes about fat people to an audience that has surged past 180,000 followers..." (He told the Post the videos earn him about $5,000 a month through TikTok's creator program.)
"To stand out, some creators have built AI-generated influencers with lives a viewer can follow along. 'Why does everybody think I'm AI? ... I'm a human being, just like you guys,' says the AI woman in one since-removed TikTok video, which was watched more than 1 million times."
One AI-generated video a dog biting a woman's face off (revealing a salad) received a quarter of a billion views.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence/making-cash-off-ai-slop-the-surreal-video-business-taking-over-the-web/ar-AA1KJ8ek
[2] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/356734251
Pop culture has always been mindless (Score:2)
by MpVpRb ( 1423381 )
Whether made by people or robots
It's hard to imagine that this will be any worse that all of the other silly fads and trends
It's also hard to imagine that it will be possible to make any money doing it in the future
Some eat it up (Score:2)
This morning I observed an elderly couple browsing Facebook. They came across one of these AI-generated videos. It showed a ferry boat packed with people sinking in some garish/cartoonish/unrealistic manner - didn't see the video myself, but I heard the audio, the screaming. The wife seemed to be captivated by it, calling over the husband to take a look as well. It looped a half-dozen times and they discussed how it was probably fake due to the motion of the boat.
Obviously there is a market for this kind of