According to The Verge, Jeremy Carrasco, who runs the @showtoolsai accounts, has gained over 300,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram since June by teaching people how to spot AI-generated videos. He’s found a niche exposing the “slop,” like Sora-generated clips with fuzzy textures and wobbly eyes, but also the darker side: accounts are using free tools to churn out content for quick cash, with a minute-long compilation of AI clips netting around $1,000 for five million views. He cites specific scams, like the “AI Chinese medicine” account Yang Mun, which uses an AI-generated healer to drive traffic to a likely AI-made $11 ebook. Worse, creators like Maddie Quinn are having their likenesses stolen and placed onto AI avatars, sometimes ending up on OnlyFans. Jeremy argues the only way to build current AI video tools is by “stealing a bunch of people’s data,” a foundationally flawed model. Meanwhile, platforms like Instagram and TikTok are failing to enforce AI labeling rules while building their own generative AI ad services, which he says will eventually “screw over the entire creator economy.”
The Attention Economy Meets the Slop Factory
Here’s the thing about the creator economy: it was always a brutal, hyper-competitive arena for human attention. But now, the playing field isn’t just other humans. It’s an infinite army of AI bots that don’t need sleep, don’t get creative block, and work for free. Jeremy’s point about the seven-second cat clip is terrifying in its simplicity. The barrier to entry for generating “content” is now basically zero. You don’t need a camera, lighting, or charisma. You just need a prompt and a free account. For someone in a developing country, that $1,000 from a viral compilation isn’t just fun money—it’s life-changing. So of course they’re going to do it. The incentive structure is completely broken.
From Scams to Full-On Identity Theft
But the quick-cash play is almost the *benign* end of the spectrum. The Yang Mun example is a classic, low-effort grift. It’s a digital snake oil salesman, but instead of a person, it’s a vaguely offensive AI caricature. The real horror show is the outright theft. Stealing a creator’s entire likeness, feeding it into a model, and putting that AI clone on OnlyFans? That’s not just copyright infringement. That’s a profound, personal violation. It makes the old days of content reposting look quaint. Platforms are utterly unequipped to handle this at scale, and their enforcement is, as Jeremy notes, inconsistent at best. They’re incentivized by engagement, and AI slop generates plenty of that.
Why the Platforms Won’t Save You
This is the killer insight. The platforms aren’t just passive victims here, flooded by this AI sludge. They’re active architects of the next phase. Meta, TikTok, YouTube—they’re all racing to build their own generative AI tools. Think about it from their business perspective. Why pay a human creator a share of ad revenue or facilitate brand deals when you can sell an AI ad service directly to the brand? Jeremy’s analogy is perfect: creators have become mini ad agencies. And now the platforms are building an in-house, automated, dirt-cheap alternative to those agencies. When he says creators are “basically just running ad agencies,” he’s pinpointing the exact part of their business that AI is poised to dismantle first. The sponsorship deal, the bread and butter, is directly in the crosshairs.
Is There Any Ethical Way Out?
Jeremy’s answer—”generally no”—is pretty damning. The Lionsgate example is telling: even a massive studio’s entire library isn’t enough data to train a useful ethical model. The current paradigm requires theft on a colossal scale. So what’s left? A desperate scramble for authenticity, maybe. But how do you prove you’re real in a sea of flawless fakes? The platforms could enforce draconian labeling and provenance, but that hurts their engagement metrics in the short term. I think Jeremy’s right. The foundation is rotten. We’re watching a gold rush where the new prospectors are bots, and the mine owners are about to replace all the human workers with machines. The creator economy fueled these platforms’ rise. Now, those same platforms are building the tools to crash it.
