How are AI Slop videos made?
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AI Slop Is Easier to Make Than You Think
We've all seen it.
The endless stream of AI-generated videos filling social media feeds, explaining topics with robotic narration, generic stock footage, and questionable accuracy. They're often irritating, occasionally misleading, and increasingly difficult to distinguish from genuine content.
Recently, I decided to find out just how hard it is to create one of these videos myself.
The answer was more concerning than I expected.
The Experiment
I deliberately put in as little effort as possible.
I asked ChatGPT how to generate a short documentary-style video and followed one of its recommendations. I signed up for an AI video generation platform, typed a simple prompt about adopting TypeScript as a software developer, selected a few default options, and clicked Generate.
Eight minutes later, I had a complete video.
No scripting.
No editing.
No voice recording.
No research.
Just a prompt and a button press.
The Results Were Terrible
The generated video contained all the hallmarks of AI slop:
- An overly enthusiastic synthetic voice.
- Generic stock footage.
- Walls of meaningless code.
- Dubious technical accuracy.
- Content apparently scraped from existing blog posts.
It was exactly the sort of content many of us have learned to recognise immediately.
Unfortunately, that's not the worrying part.
The worrying part is how little effort it required.
Why AI Slop Is Everywhere
Creating low-quality content used to require at least some investment of time and effort.
Today, almost anyone can generate a passable-looking video in minutes.
The barrier to entry has effectively disappeared.
If a creator can produce dozens of videos per day with almost no effort, quantity becomes more important than quality. Platforms reward engagement, algorithms reward volume, and the result is a flood of content that exists primarily because it is easy to create.
The economics make perfect sense.
The user experience does not.
The Technology Is Improving
Today's AI-generated videos are often easy to spot.
The narration feels unnatural.
The visuals don't quite match the script.
The information can be shallow or inaccurate.
But that advantage may not last for long.
Modern AI systems can already generate increasingly realistic video, voice, and lip-syncing. We've started to see demonstrations where speech is translated into other languages while preserving the speaker's voice and facial movements.
Some of these developments are genuinely impressive.
They're also making it increasingly difficult to tell what is real and what is synthetic.
There Is a Legitimate Use Case
Not all AI-generated media is worthless.
The tools can be useful for:
- Drafting presentations.
- Creating rough prototypes.
- Generating B-roll footage.
- Producing internal training materials.
- Rapidly testing content ideas.
In a hybrid workflow, AI can save a considerable amount of time.
The problem arises when the generated output becomes the final product instead of the starting point.
Without human expertise, editing, and quality control, the result is often little more than automated noise.
The Real Lesson
The most important thing I learned wasn't that AI-generated videos can be bad.
We already knew that.
What surprised me was how little effort was required to create them.
From opening ChatGPT to producing a finished video took less than twenty minutes.
That's enough time for almost anyone to become a content factory.
Once you understand how easy it is, the explosion of AI slop across the internet suddenly makes perfect sense.
Final Thoughts
AI video generation is not inherently good or bad.
It's simply another tool.
The challenge is that the cost of producing content has collapsed while the value of thoughtful, original work remains exactly the same.
As the technology improves, quality, authenticity, and expertise may become even more important differentiators than they are today.
Because if anyone can generate content in minutes, the thing that matters is no longer whether something can be created.
It's whether it's worth watching.