In the algorithm-driven economy of 2025, one man’s Shrimp Jesus is another man’s sidekick.
AI slop – the low-quality, unrealistic content flooding social media platforms designed to farm ideas – is a phenomenon, some would say. 2024 and 2025 internet event. Merriam-Webster word of the year This is the year of “slope”, which specifically refers to the Internet variety.
This came shortly after the advent of popular large language models like ChatGPT and Dall-E, which democratized content creation and enabled vast numbers of Internet denizens to create images and videos that – to varying degrees – resembled the creations of professionals.
In 2024, it began achieving peak cultural moments. Notable among these was Shrimp Jesus, a viral trend that flooded Facebook with AI-generated images of the deity associated with crustaceans. Shrimp Jesus immediately found the hallmarks of the AI slop genre: videos of old women claiming to celebrate their 122nd birthday, and mini soap operas about the dramatic lives of cats.
In 2025, the flood continues, growing more supernatural and more blatantly copyright-infringing. This spring saw the arrival of Ghiblification – that is, a trend that involves users Nayib Bukele Presented to the White House ImagesIncluding exile in the style of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli. This special moment was enabled by OpenAI releasing an image generator powered by GPT-4o; OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman jumped on the trend by Ghiblifying his Post,
>Be me
>Trying for a decade to help create superintelligence to cure cancer or anything else
>Mostly the first 7.5 years no one cares, then 2.5 years everyone hates you for everything
>Wake up one day to hundreds of messages: “Look I made you a twink Ghibli style haha”– Sam Altman (@sama) 26 March 2025
Elsewhere Miyazaki is the chief architect of Studio Ghibli’s distinctive, hand-drawn animation style SaidOn the subject of artificial intelligence: “I would never want to incorporate this technology into my work. I feel strongly that it is an insult to life.”
This was followed by other moments of AI decline: a flood of videos of AI-generated fat people competing in the Olympics, pressure cookers exploding, and more cats. Ibrahim Traoré, the leader of the military junta in Burkina Faso, became the centerpiece of an AI slop cult featuring Justin Bieber’s video. singing On the streets of Ouagadougou.
In some ways, the AI slope has improved. Gone – mostly – are the days of six-fingered hands and missing limbs that characterized the output of early image generators. However, in some ways, the AI slope has hardly changed. It’s still unnatural and decontextualized, still aimed straight at the amygdala, still chasing virality with the lowest barriers to entry in fiction: no plot, no exposition, surreal fantasy and cats, cats, cats.
Describing this flood of unreality as merely a technological phenomenon misses one of the main drivers of the AI decline. In one view it is the endpoint of the Internet determined by algorithms that is optimized for engagement and turbocharged with new, powerful tools. This will not change unless the platforms and their algorithms change.
But it is also the product of an underlying global economy – one that is everywhere, increasingly dependent on a few powerful technology companies and a few powerful platforms, which seem to offer diminishing returns for real work but abundant fortunes for the lucky, viral few.
AI slope creator is, after all, a profession. They come from everywhere – from America to India to Kenya to Ukraine. In some ways, it could be argued that AI tools have enabled a strange globalization of content, says Arseny Alenichev, who studies the production of images in global health. Earlier this year, Alenichev noticed a flood of “AI poverty porn” on major stock photo sites. Many of the creators of the images have Eastern European usernames, he said.
He said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if these are just artists trying to create extreme images of everything, hoping someone will buy them.”
It is not easy to make it into an AI slope. Oleksandr, an AI YouTube creator based in Chernivtsi, Ukraine, estimates that only the top 5% of creators make money from a video, and only 1% make a living from it.
After retiring from being a professional volleyball player, Oleksandr started his own business in 2024. He was deep in debt, he said, and was in the worst period of his life: his girlfriend had left him, his parents were living in occupied Mariupol. He started joining Telegram channels and watching YouTube Video How to earn money from YouTube.
Their first efforts were music channels, playing AI-generated music over images of sexy AI girls. They had seven: retrowave, rock, jazz and more. At first, he said, he put a lot of effort into each video, but he soon realized it didn’t make sense on YouTube. “It was a conveyor belt, of very low quality.”
His video attracted attention from hundreds of other similar channels, so much so that a Japanese filmmaker contacted him to license one of his pieces for a short film.
Then he expanded. At the peak of his business, he had a team of 15 people operating 930 channels, 270 of which he successfully monetized. At one point he paid up to $20,000 (£15,000) per month, although YouTube often blocked or removed his channels, including sexy AI girls, for unclear reasons.
Their content evolved. One useful niche they found was life stories – long anecdotes written by ChatGPIT or Gemini, filled with scenes, which were extremely popular: “Grandparents listen to this before bed, or while on a walk in the park.”
Another topic, he said, were videos on “lewd adult topics” – such as erotic tractors – which were in high demand, but were at the limit of what YouTube allows. These channels were riskier to build, but sometimes easier to monetize, because they had less competition.
“It’s easier with erotic people, because they get blocked more often, so a lot of people don’t want to bother and re-create the channel from time to time”, he said. “I saw opportunity, and other people saw difficulty.”
Now, the work has eased somewhat: YouTube has become more aggressive with removing its content, which means it has to re-create channels. He and his team now earn about $3,000. But Oleksandr credits the platform — and the videos he watched — for changing his life, allowing him to resolve his debts and build a career that he (somewhat) loves.
However, it is not a site of artistic aspirations. A large part of the work involves adding nearly naked AI women to videos of tractors.
“To make money here you have to spend as little as possible,” he said. “YouTube is basically just clickbait and sexism, no matter how morally deplorable it is. That’s the way the world and consumers are.”
A YouTube spokesperson said: “Generative AI is a tool, and like any tool it can be used to create both high- and low-quality content. We’re focused on connecting our users to high-quality content, no matter how it’s created. All content uploaded to YouTube must follow our Community Guidelines, and if we find that content violates a policy, we remove it.”
