The title of this thread may be wrong.
AI isn’t taking your job. Tech companies (some of the same that sell you expensive tools and hardware) are taking your job. And so are CEOs who prefer machines over humans, because you know humans are unreliable pesky expenses. Also in on gig are a tried-and-true group of people looking to make a quick buck without scruples. There’s nothing new in total, it’s just another episode of Survivor.
When Google Veo3 came out, they didn’t think about Flame artists, they thought about some of the people quoted in this story.
Good reporting by the WaPo on this topic, and the rise of AI slop, and AI creators displacing traditional content pipelines and their workers.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/08/17/ai-video-slop-creators/
(this is behind WaPo/Apple News paywall), quoting some relevant sections.
Nothing has transformed or polluted the creative landscape in the past few years quite like AI video, whose tools turn text commands into full-color footage that can look uncannily real. In the three years since ChatGPT’s launch, AI videos have come to dominate the social web, copying and sometimes supplanting the human artists and videographers whose work helped train the systems in the first place.
Built on tools from America’s biggest tech giants, offered free or at low cost, the videos have touched off a kind of existential panic among the purveyors of traditional art, fueling anxiety that they could crowd out filmmakers, journalists and other creators for whom every scene takes money and time.
AI videos don’t try to compete on “authenticity, aesthetic value or thought-provoking concepts,” he said. Instead, they’re pumped out at industrial speed for maximum engagement, relying on viewers’ shock and fascination to make them spread.
Luis Talavera, 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, some of whom comment to ask if the scenes are real.
The low-effort, high-volume nature of AI videos has earned them the nickname “AI slop,” and Talavera knows his videos aren’t high art. But they earn him about $5,000 a month through TikTok’s creator program, he said, so every night and weekend he spends hours churning them out. “I’ve been on my couch holding my 3-month-old daughter, saying, ‘Hey, ChatGPT, we’re gonna create this script,’” he said.
Adele, a 20-year-old student in Florida told The Washington Post she is taking a break from college to focus on making money from her AI-video accounts. Another creator in Arizona who went viral with an AI airport kangaroo said he made $15,000 in commissions in three months.
Beyond video, there is AI music; one band, Velvet Sundown, had its AI-generated folk song “Dust on the Wind” climb to the top of Spotify’s Viral 50 charts, despite the fact that the band members don’t actually exist.
Even bigger deals are being made. The prediction-gambling company Kalshi paid for a TV commercial during the NBA Finals featuring AI people, including a woman being battered by a hurricane, screaming their bets about current events. Jack Such, a Kalshi spokesman, said the video cost $2,000 in AI-prompting fees and went from idea to live in less than 72 hours, far quicker than a traditional studio could do. The creator, PJ Accetturo, said “high-dopamine” AI videos would be “the ad trend of 2025.”
In the end the trick that allowed the email spammers of the oughts with their broken English to con grandma out of her savings, just have morphed into a new breed that is happy to take American company’s money - both from duped CEOs, and advertisers who are willing to do anything in the attention economy to survive another day.
What now? There’s good writing that those who see AI tools as productivity enhancer rather than a replacement are faring well. And as is stated in this piece, this AI content is not competing on authenticity, craftsmanship or shelf life. In any economy there is a sliver of brands who’s values are aligned with quality and control. Stay the course and thread the needle. The seats getting removed from the theater were for clients who never valued what we do, but had no other options. The ones who remain, are the good ones. There will just be fewer.
