For six months, my husband satisfied everybody that I had stolen thousands and thousands from the corporate I constructed, together with our personal daughter. As I sat in federal court docket, sure I used to be about to lose my freedom, the doorways out of the blue opened. My 9-year-old son walked in carrying an outdated blue backpack, regarded straight on the choose, and mentioned, “Your Honor. I do know who framed my mother. They’re sitting on this room.”
So begins a thread on X that appeared in my feed someday. I knew that the first-person narrator most likely didn’t exist, and following this thread would draw me right into a mawkish story the place good triumphs over evil. Certainly, the writer is just not a mom on trial for theft, however a self-identified 21-year-old inventory dealer in Nigeria, who makes use of AI to generate tales—and will get paid for it by X.
I discovered this out once I started questioning concerning the proliferation of those compact melodramas of redemption in my feed. It’s most likely my very own fault; I typically idly click on on these tacky tales—, simply to see what occurs subsequent—and the algorithm took discover. On this case, the writer is considered one of numerous beneficiaries of X’s Creative Revenue Sharing program, which pays for posts that enhance engagement on the platform. To affix, a creator should turn out to be a Premium X person, have at the least 500 verified followers, and have drawn a minimal of 5 million impressions within the final three-month interval. The stated goal is to encourage “genuine, high-quality content material,” and a number of the cash certainly goes to creators doing simply that.
However paying for posts that go viral makes this system ripe for exploitation. Some creators in this system interact in “rage baiting,” utilizing outrageous content material to attract feedback and views. In Might 2025, X sued 8 Vietnamese creators and 25 “John Does,” alleging that they fraudulently drew cash from this system by posting phony AI-generated content material after which boosting engagement by bot-driven feedback. In April, X moved to chop the funds of “aggregators” who primarily posted information from different sources, and threatened sanctions towards those that overused the BREAKING tag to attract eyeballs. On July 16 of this 12 months, X revealed that it had eliminated thousands and thousands of posts that purloined already-published content material posted by others.
It’s not clear how X regards the AI-generated story slop that has contaminated my feed. (The corporate, now a part of xAI—which is itself now part of SpaceX—wouldn’t reply my questions on this.) Many of the tales are falsely introduced as true first-person narratives, although it’s fairly apparent that they’re fabricated. In lots of instances, the creators describe themselves of their profile as storytellers. It’s exhausting to show that the precise authors are AI fashions, however the overwhelming majority bear the indicators. The posts are manipulative and dumb and something however genuine.
Rob Cowl, a professor at Australia’s RMIT Digital Ethnography Analysis Centre who studies AI-generated content, broke down the construction of those posts for me in an electronic mail. It’s as formalized as a sonnet. First comes a rage-baiting setup, “during which an harmless individual is wrongfully fired, evicted, scammed, loses their rightful place on public transport, or is the topic of judicial overreach.” That is adopted by a turnaround: “The underdog is redeemed whereas the adversary is defeated, humiliated, and shamed (usually as a illustration of a public shaming),” says Cowl.
In lots of of those tales, narrators are in possession of sealed paperwork that flip the desk on tormentors, usually in divorce disputes or the execution of a relative’s property. Or it could possibly be one thing so simple as an airline passenger who fiercely retains their assigned seat when impolite moochers lay declare to it—and the adversary suffers a stroll of disgrace to the again of the airplane.
