AI “Slop” Videos: Annoying, Addictive, and Surprisingly Profitable

By


Cats, Algorithms, and Cash: How LowEffort AI Videos Are Taking Over




AI “Slop” Videos: Annoying, Addictive, and Surprisingly Profitable

The Rise of Strange, Disposable AI Clips

If you spend any amount of time scrolling through YouTube or TikTok lately, you’ve probably noticed something odd creeping into your feed. The videos don’t look quite polished, but they’re colorful, loud, and weirdly hypnotic. A kitten might be paddling through a pool of rainbow slime. Or maybe it’s flying on a pancakeshaped blimp. The voices are robotic, the animation a little clunky and yet, somehow, these clips rack up millions of views.

Critics have started calling them “AI slop.” The label is not flattering, and it isn’t supposed to be. It refers to the flood of loweffort, AIgenerated videos designed less for storytelling or artistic value and more for sheer algorithmic traction. In other words, they’re not made for humans in the traditional sense they’re made for the machine that decides what humans see.

Still, dismissing them as “slop” only captures part of the picture. Annoying? Sure. But they’re also lucrative.

The Kitten That Prints Money

Take the channel FUNTASTIC YT. It belongs to Mark Lawrence I Garilao, a 21yearold college student in the Philippines who studies computer science. His claim to fame? Dozens of short clips about a wideeyed kitten and his exasperated dad.

The formula is simple. In one clip, the kitten eyes a backyard pool full of neon goo and asks, “Dad, can I swim in this slime pool?” Dad, who is inexplicably stuck in the goo himself, replies, “No son, I’m stuck. Please help me.” That’s the whole story. End scene.

And yet, this tiny vignette has been viewed more than two million times. Other episodes feature the same kitten riding a colapowered car or splashing around in a pool of gummy bears. It’s surreal, nonsensical, and oddly funny like the kind of joke you might scribble in the margins of a notebook during a boring lecture.

What really matters, though, is that these clips make money. A lot of it. Garilao admitted his peak month brought in $9,000 from YouTube ads more than many new graduates could hope to earn in an entire year at an entrylevel job in his country.

So, is this “slop”? Or is it a clever way of bending new technology to one’s advantage?

Creativity or Spam?




Not everyone is charmed. Adam Bumas, who writes for the tech newsletter Garbage Day, argues that these videos don’t exist for any genuine expressive purpose. They’re pure engagement bait. Jason Koebler, from the site 404Media, puts it more bluntly: “AI is really superpowering spam.”

That phrasing “superpowering spam” captures the unease. Spam isn’t new, but AI allows for endless, tireless production of content at a scale no human creator could match. One person can churn out dozens of clips a week, each tuned to exploit whatever meme or trend is peaking. Garilao, for example, admitted that his record month happened because he blended the kitten storyline with the bizarre “Italian brainrot” meme characters, like a ballerina with a coffee cup for a head or a sneakerwearing shark.

From a certain angle, that’s clever adaptation. From another, it looks like pollution of the digital environment.

The Bigger Problem: Attention Collapse

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: platforms like YouTube and TikTok thrive on engagement, not meaning. If people are watching whether because they genuinely enjoy it or because they’re too baffled to look away the system rewards it.

Koebler and others argue that this is drowning out more traditional creators. A photographer who spends days editing a careful short film might never surface in the algorithm, while a halfhour of AI tinkering could produce a kitten clip that racks up millions of views. As Koebler put it, “discoverability on the internet has already started to collapse.”

That may sound dramatic, but if you’ve tried to find independent art or niche communities online lately, you might feel the same. Search results are crowded with massproduced content, and the line between creativity and automation grows blurrier by the week.

Platforms Play Both Sides




Interestingly, social media companies aren’t quite sure what to do about this. TikTok and Instagram have started labeling AIgenerated content, while YouTube recently updated its policies to forbid “inauthentic” or repetitive material. Yet in practice, these rules are squishy. Casey Fiesler, a professor who studies tech ethics, points out that the new wording doesn’t explicitly target AI.

Meanwhile, the same companies are actively building AI tools into their own platforms encouraging creators to use them for editing, effects, and even background generation. It’s a bit like complaining about junk food while simultaneously selling more french fries.

Koebler suspects the hesitation comes from a larger vision. Platforms might privately believe that in five years, most online content will be AImade, and that audiences will simply adapt. Whether that’s dystopian or just inevitable probably depends on your appetite for rainbowslime kittens.

The Human Angle

Garilao, for his part, isn’t plotting cultural collapse. He just thinks it’s fun. Sitting in his room, juggling computer science classes and AI tools, he whips up one or two videos a day. Each takes only an hour or two. For him, it’s not about spamming the internet but experimenting with a new form of storytelling if we can call it that.

And honestly, it’s hard to begrudge him. If you’re 21 and suddenly making thousands a month from silly animations, wouldn’t you keep going? The blame, if there is any, probably lies less with individuals like Garilao and more with the structures that reward this kind of production.

Between Annoyance and Fascination

So where does that leave us? On one hand, AI slop feels like background noise disposable clips designed to clog up feeds and siphon ad dollars. On the other, it’s also a glimpse into a future where the boundaries of “content” are thinner, stranger, and maybe more democratic. Anyone with a laptop and an idea (or half an idea) can now play the algorithmic lottery.

But let’s not romanticize it too much. For every kid who cashes in, there are countless artists whose work gets buried deeper under waves of AI sludge. And beyond the annoyance, there’s a darker side: misinformation clips, fake celebrity rescues, and the steady erosion of trust in what we see online.

Still, the fact remains: millions of people are watching. Maybe the real lesson is less about whether AI slop is good or bad, and more about what our collective attention gravitates toward. We say we want thoughtful, highquality storytelling but sometimes we just can’t resist a kitten swimming through rainbow goo.


Open Your Mind !!!

Source: NPR

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Google’s Veo 3 AI Video Tool Is Redefining Reality — And The World Isn’t Ready

By
Image
Google’s Veo 3 AI Video Tool Is Redefining Reality — And The World Isn’t Ready In May 2025, Google unveiled Veo 3, its latest AI-powered video generation model, at the Google I/O event. This groundbreaking tool has rapidly transformed the landscape of digital content creation, enabling users to produce hyper-realistic videos complete with synchronized audio, dialogue, and sound effects—all from simple text or image prompts. As Veo 3 garners attention for its impressive capabilities, it also raises significant questions about the future of media authenticity, creative professions, and the ethical implications of AI-generated content. What Sets Veo 3 Apart? Veo 3 represents a significant leap forward in AI video generation technology. Unlike its predecessors and competitors, Veo 3 offers: Native Audio Integration: Veo 3 can generate synchronized audio, including dialogues, ambient sounds, and music, enhancing the realism of the videos.  High-Quality Visuals: The model produces vi...
Read more

Tiny Machines, Huge Impact: Molecular Jackhammers Wipe Out Cancer Cells

By
Image
  Tiny Machines, Huge Impact: Molecular Jackhammers Wipe Out Cancer Cells 1. A Revolutionary Cancer-Killing Tool Scientists from Rice University, Texas A&M, and the University of Texas MD Anderson have invented a radical tool that destroys 99% of cancer cells —without using drugs, radiation, or heat. Instead, it uses special dye molecules and gently applied light to physically rip cancer cells apart from the inside. This technique—nicknamed “molecular jackhammers” —has achieved astonishing results in lab cultures and animal studies. These molecular jackhammers are based on a familiar dye used in hospitals: aminocyanine . When exposed to near-infrared light , this dye vibrates at incredibly high frequencies—up to 1 trillion times per second. These vibrations break open cancer cell membranes, causing cells to collapse. Published in the journal Nature Chemistry , this discovery offers a new frontier in cancer treatment by physically destroying tumor cells rather than pois...
Read more

A New Kind of Life: Scientists Push the Boundaries of Genetics

By
Image
A New Kind of Life: Scientists Push the Boundaries of Genetics The strange idea of making life “better” It almost sounds like science fiction: a team of researchers in Cambridge claims they’ve created a form of life that’s leaner, more efficient, maybe even “more perfect” than anything nature has ever managed. That phrase more perfect is tricky, of course, because perfection in biology is a moving target. What works in one environment is useless in another. Still, the claim is bold. The scientists didn’t just tweak a gene here or there, like swapping out corn DNA to make it more pestresistant. They rewrote the actual structure of life’s code, stripping it down, removing what they saw as excess baggage. The result is something they call Syn57 : a genetically engineered strain of E. coli. Yes, the same bacterium you’ve probably heard about from grim foodsafety warnings. Only this version isn’t lurking on a questionable hot dogit’s a reimagined lifeform built line by line from altere...
Read more