I stumbled across this genre yesterday and I’m morbidly fascinated. It combines AI generated ‘motivational music’ with transformation videos:
(To be fair I’ve had the second one stuck in my head all morning. I think it’s catchier than a lot of human-generated motivational music I’ve heard)
And it uses this as background music for what seems to be a mix of obviously AI-generated personal transformation videos and seemingly real videos ripped from TikTok:
So this is rather depressing in many ways, particularly the endless comments from supportive boomers saying “well done young man, I’m proud of you”. But the obvious question to ask here is why and how the media environment is so conducive to this slop? This is an extension of the platform’s logic rather than a perversion of it, with content creators distilling the essence of a particular genre then automating the production process. There’s a horror of strategic conduct sometimes discernible in the discourse about AI slop (“people are just pumping out these low quality videos as fast as they can!”) but this wasn’t a creation of LLMs, it was an existing cultural mechanism for which LLMs have been leveraged. The motivation is a familiar one, it’s just the quantity/quality dynamics have shifted, particularly given how lowering cost of productions means content strategies can be built around low to medium levels of engagement rather than constantly pushing for the largest possible audience.
AI slop is ‘good enough’ content for engagement purposes and that’s what is new to the platform economy, I think. This wasn’t viable as a commercial strategy until relatively recently.
Eleven years deep, then the silence came loud,
Broken family photos, empty chairs in the crowd.
Used to drown in a bottle just to numb the ache,
Now I train with the demons that I used to break.
Mark Carrigan 