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Making Cash Off 'AI Slop': the Surreal Video Business Taking Over the Web


The Washington Post looks at 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 m...

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. 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.)

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