Can You Get Rich Quick Off A.I. Slop?
By Oliver Whang, The New York Times, 6/2/26
…
Affiliate Network was looking for people to make A.I. videos.
There were no job requirements. Creators were simply expected to make new, anonymous social media accounts and post videos every day. The more views the videos got, the more money the creators would make, at a rate of about $2 per thousand views. …
some broad patterns for successful viral videos:
quick cuts, incoherence, and a hook off the top…that many of the most viral videos had their own logic…
Instead of being limited to the existing brain rot, he could create new characters so unapologetically stupid that viewers would laugh in disbelief at their very existence. …
The line between advertising and entertainment has become blurred in the internet age. Food reviews might turn out to be paid for by restaurants; the top-rated ergonomic chair in a listicle might be one produced by the company that owns the website; singers in music videos sip from glasses with logos carefully turned toward the camera. Because the best advertising is, as the 1980 trade book “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind” puts it, “like a light fog, a very light fog that envelops your prospects,” the more exposure an ad gets, the better it works. This is why successful advertising today is so much about going viral…“attention is the most valuable resource in the world.”… [end quote]
I didn’t actually finish reading the article because it was filled with animated AI slop which I can’t stand looking at.
@Leap1, since you designed NFTs when they were in vogue, you might want to explore creating AI slop.
I said to Gemini, "The article talked about how “attention is the most valuable commodity.” I can understand this if the AI slop had advertising or product placements but it seems to be just pointless garbage images. "
Gemini answered:
Here is exactly how “pointless garbage images” are turned into real money, and why the economics work for the scammers.
1. Cost is Effectively Zero
When NFTs were in vogue, creators still had to pay “gas fees” to mint them on the blockchain. With generative AI, the cost to create an image is effectively zero. A single bad actor doesn’t hire designers; they write a script that commands an AI to churn out thousands of images a day—like giant crabs, surreal historical photos, or bizarre religious imagery. Because the cost of production is zero, they don’t need a high success rate. If 99% of the images fail to get traction, the 1% that goes viral pays for everything.
2. The “MFA” (Made For Advertising) Website Trap
This is where the actual cash extraction happens. The process usually follows a specific pipeline:
- The Bait: A bizarre AI image is posted on Facebook, X (Twitter), or TikTok.
- The Hook: The caption is written purely to trigger emotional, uncritical engagement from unsuspecting users (often older adults or bots). It might say, “Why don’t images like this trend?” or “Today is my 104th birthday, please give me a blessing!”
- The Click: Once a post gains algorithmic momentum, the creator drops a link in the comments or bio: “See the unbelievable full story here!”
- The Payoff: The link leads to a low-quality “Made for Advertising” (MFA) website. These pages are stripped of real content but are completely plastered with programmatic ads (Google AdSense, Taboola, Outbrain). The moment a user lands on that page, the creator gets paid a fraction of a cent for the ad impression. Multiply that by millions of clicks, and a single viral slop image can generate thousands of dollars in a few days.
3. Monetizing the Account Itself
Social media platforms now pay creators directly based on engagement or ad-revenue sharing (like X’s creator payout program or Meta’s bonus programs).
- Engagement Spoofing: Because the platforms’ algorithms prioritize metrics like comments and shares, it doesn’t matter if the comments are people saying “Wow, amazing!” or “This is obviously fake.” To the algorithm, a comment is a comment. High engagement pushes the post to more feeds, which triggers higher platform payouts.
- Flipping the Account: Once an account reaches 100,000 followers by posting viral garbage, the owner will strip the page clean, rename it, and sell the established account on the black market to a crypto scammer, a drop-shipping business, or a political disinformation campaign.
4. Audience Arbitrage
The ultimate commodity being traded here is not art; it is human reaction times. The creators are targeting the split-second gap between someone seeing an image, feeling a sudden flash of emotion (pity, awe, confusion), and hitting “share” or “click” before their critical thinking kicks in.
It is the exact same psychological exploit as the NFT craze, but automated at an industrial scale. Instead of convincing one person to buy a worthless digital token for $100, they are convincing a million people to inadvertently give them a micro-fraction of a cent by clicking a link or leaving a comment.
It’s a digital ecosystem built entirely on ghost traffic, where machines generate garbage to trick human reflexes, all to extract fractions of pennies from corporate advertising budgets. It is exhausting to look at, but mechanically, it is highly profitable.
Wendy
