The AI Slopocalypse

AI-generated content is everywhere. It's demoralizing for human creators. And dangerous for democracy.

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AI slop is everywhere.

It's coming at you in your social media feeds. In your search results. In your messaging apps. On your answering machine. In the podcasts you listen to. In the "news" sites you visit. In the "pink slime" newspapers landing on your doorstep. In the Amazon and Etsy reviews you read. Even in the advertising you see when you're walking down the street.

Earlier this month 404 Media reported on, "a sophisticated and growing AI slop content ecosystem that is flooding YouTube" and "drowning out human-made content."

With a steady stream of videos that quickly rack up tens of thousands of views, channels like Boring History and Sleepy Historian are "quite literally rewriting history with surface-level, automated drek that the YouTube algorithm delivers to people," notes 404 Media.

These algorithmically boosted AI videos routinely outperform, "content created by real anthropologists and historians who spend weeks or months researching, fact-checking, scripting, recording, and editing their videos."

AI is coming for your eardrums as well as your eyeballs

Meanwhile, Inception Point AI's "Quiet Please Podcast Network," is now producing 5,000 shows — and churning out 3,000 new episodes a week at a cost of $1 or less per episode.

In a video viewable on the Inception Point AI website, entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk asserts that:

"Fake people, AI people, are going to be some of the biggest influencers in the world, and companies and humans are going to own those people, and it's going to be huge."

According to Inception Point, its "Quiet Please" podcasts, each hosted by one of about 50 AI personalities the company has created, can target niche audiences so efficiently that it only takes 20 listens of an episode to generate enough programmatic ad revenue to make that episode profitable.

Demoralizing for human creators, dangerous for democracy

While some hail AI-generated content as a "win for consumers" who gain access to more of the content they most desire, the age of AI slop is quickly becoming demoralizing — and demonetizing — for human creators.

And things will only get worse now that China has shown us that AI avatars are able to sell more than real people can. With no bathroom breaks.

Marketers and entrepreneurs are leaning into the "efficiencies," with one survey showing that "81.6% of marketers think content writers’ jobs are at risk because of AI."

Meanwhile, consumers are now routinely being tricked — by bouncing bunnies, dangerous chatbots, and deepfake scammers.

For humans who want to build careers in the creative arts, the age of AI slop creates an existential crisis:

• AI can now create art in seconds, novels in minutes, and movies at a fraction of the cost
• What generative AI can produce today is the worst it's ever going to be
• The glut of content is only going to get worse — the volume of content that creators must compete with is multiplying exponentially
• In an era of "scale" and "efficiency," time invested in "craft" and "labor" continues to be devalued
• As it becomes harder than ever to distinguish AI content from human content, those who insist the art and entertainment they consume must have "humanity" or "soul" will soon become a tiny minority

Within the creative industries, those who have already achieved success and status — including novelists, journalists, online influencers, musicians, and visual artists — will continue to connect with audiences for, hopefully, years to come.

Those now working in creative roles in media, entertainment, and advertising will be required to adapt, expected to embrace new AI tools to produce more, faster and cheaper.

Very few writers or artists with bills to pay will have the luxury of rejecting AI completely or for long.

Young people who imagine themselves as "creatives" face an uncertain career future. They must navigate a world in which traditional entry-level jobs are drying up. They must face the reality that consumers will soon be able to have all the content they want produced just for them, almost instantly and in any format, by an AI (or multiple AI agents) trained to understand their preferences.

I don't know what the jobs of the future will look like, or if they'll exist

If I were 20 years old today, I don't think I would be filled with literary ambition. I don't think I would spend months or years toiling on a manuscript in the hope that it would sell, find an audience, and be acclaimed as a great novel. I don't think I would imagine books or even screenplays having any kind of impact in the world of 2030 or 2035 or 2040 — a world in which attention spans are reduced to seconds and entertainment is customized, always-on and fully immersive.

I would, though, have plenty of reasons to be worried about the future.

Today, the big problems that have loomed over 20-year-olds for their entire lifetimes — such as climate change, gun violence, the national debt, and a system completely rigged against them — loom larger than ever.

Worse, we're bringing back old problems like fascism and preventable diseases that their parents (maybe even their grandparents) didn't have to deal with.

Worse still, the tech billionaires who once promised to save the world have decided not to save it after all, but to take it over.

And it may be too late to stop them.

If you're reading this, you are now susceptible to the most effective forms of targeted persuasion ever invented

To recap: We're all drowning in AI slop. It's harder than ever for regular humans to break through.

But some people — those with large platforms and/or a ton of money — do still get a megaphone. And the ability to be heard consistently.

In this world, the most powerful people — e.g. Trump and Musk — don't just have large platforms and tons of money.

They also own platforms. And even then, they still have people lining up to shovel more cash their way. In Trump's case, that means bribes. In Musk's, it's a trillion-dollar pay package.

Unlike the aging and ailing Trump, Musk even has the potential to be in our lives and still be screaming in our faces for decades to come.

Through his companies and government contracts — and the data theft he engineered via DOGE — Musk now has access to unprecedented amounts of data.

He's using all his data to train his a hate-spewing "antiwoke" Grok AI — now one of the world's most powerful large language models. He's making Grok essential to kids' lives by offering them not only "pornified" AI companions, but also an image generator that glorifies gun violence and a video generator that lets users make porn. Plus an "Unhinged" mode that lets them perfect the use of racial slurs and the art of cyberbulling.

And he's using X, one of the world's most powerful social media platforms, to force-feed his own hate speech and his calls for violence, plus all the Grok-produced AI slop he thinks users can handle, into the feeds of hundreds of millions of users every hour of every day.

Both on X and off, Elon will using all the data he controls and the AI and algorithmic tools at his disposal to target Americans with a level of personalized propaganda that Cambridge Analytica could only dream of in 2016.

The kind of 1:1 persuasion that Sam Altman warned us was coming — and might destroy us — way back in 2023.

Elon's goal: Making tech fascism impossible to un-install

The calendar tells us the midterm elections, which may or may not take place, are less than 14 months away.

Whether or not they do take place will depend on how well Elon and the forces of tech fascism convince us to ignore, amid a worsening Trump-induced economic collapse/healthcare nightmare/debt crisis/geopolitical shitstorm, the evidence of our own lived experience and focus instead on the "existential" threat posed by "the woke mind virus."*

As I wrote earlier this year:

Ever since he realized he'd fathered a transgender daughter, Musk has been on a singular mission.

"This is a battle to the death with the anti-civilizational woke mind virus," announced Elon Musk in a tweet to his more than 177 million X followers on 20 March 2024.

And in order to kill the woke mind virus — and restore white male supremacy — he'll use any means necessary. He will spend unlimited amounts of cash to do it. He will lie, cheat and manipulate to do it. He will partner with the most vile scum of the Earth to do it. He will destroy America to do it. He will kill us all if he has to.

In the days following the murder of Charlie Kirk on September 10, Elon ratcheted up his calls for violence with "dark, inflammatory" tweets on X and an incendiary speech to 100,000-strong crowd of white supremacists in the UK that was denounced by Downing Street as "dangerous and inflammatory."

But it wasn't all grieving and talk of violence.

While Trump took time out from mourning Charlie Kirk to go golfing, Elon also focused on some self-care, celebrating his new trillion-dollar pay package by buying himself $1 billion-worth of Tesla shares on September 12.

For someone who started the year throwing Nazi salutes and facing protests against his "Swasticar" around the world before having a massive, possibly staged "falling out" with Jeffrey Epstein's former wingman Donald Trump, 2025 has turned out quite nicely for Elon Musk.

Tesla stock is up 85% from its April low. Musk's new pay package affords him enough to singlehandedly solve all U.S homelessness (and keep it solved) for the next 30 years (although he won't). The U.S. government seems unfazed that he stole all our data. Despite Musk's falling out with Hegseth's boss, in July the Department of War signed a contract worth $200 million to give America's warriors/garbage-collectors access to the "maximally truth-seeking" and "Unhinged" chatbot they need. In August, the White House even intervened to make sure Grok was approved for all government departments.

In other words, as the rest of us drown in the AI slop he's encouraging everyone to create, it's starting to look like Elon has already won.

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*Reality check: The "woke mind virus" is not the reason why ACA premiums are set to spike 75% next year. It's not the reason diseases are spreading, vaccinations are being canceled, or toxic pollution is being allowed by the government to poison your air and water. The woke mind virus is not what elected the most corrupt administration in history. It's not the reason that grocery and electricity prices (which Trump promised to slash) are surging. It's not the reason the 15 years Trump spent partying with sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein also correspond to the period in his life when he was most likely to be accused of, or publicly admit to, harassing and assaulting dozens of underage girls and women. In other words, if you're blaming all your problems on the "woke mind virus," you may not have many actual problems.