No one actually likes AI influencers

New live show dropped. Garbage Day is doing its first ever event in DC next month! We’re partnering with progressive political organization Run For Something and it’s going to be all about the midterms (gulp). It’s on November 18th at 7pm at Pubkey in DC’s Penn Quarter. Featured guests included Run For Something’s co-founder and president, Amanda Litman, and podcaster and author (and Panic World guest) Bridget Todd. Hit the big green button below to get tickets!

Last month, Anthropic started rolling out access to its new model, Opus 5.5, which users were quick to claim was so powerful it could mash up video games with a simple prompt. Most of these users were, of course, lying.

The majority of these “mods” are basically just videos that an AI rendered, rather than actually playable games. And the games that are playable, like a much-hyped Pokémon fan game that was making the rounds last week, are so limited in features and full of so much AI jank that they barely count as a game. To say nothing of how prohibitively expensive it is to try and vibe code or integrate AI into a working game.

One developer learned this the hard way. They built a game called Teach My Little Sister How To Drive, which is a driving sim that features an NPC running on Google’s Gemini model. The game was a hit on Steam, which is actually a problem. Just the free demo is costing the team behind it $1000 a day in tokens. Another huge fucking loser vibe-coded a game where you shoot homeless people in San Fransisco’s Tenderloin district and is bragging on X that he made “$300 in ad sales.”

And a similar, allegedly vibe-coded game popped up on Steam last week. It’s called Hood Warfare 2 and it’s described as a “chaotic and humorous” first-person shooter where you play as gang members in Detroit. It’s ugly and stupid and all the AI guys on X can’t stop chattering about how much money it’s made. I’ve seen estimates as high as $600,000.

There isn’t a lot of information about how Hood Warfare 2 was vibe coded, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s an AI rebuild of the studio’s original Hood Warfare game that came out in 2023. Most of the reviews on the game’s Steam page are racist jokes about Black people, but one genuine review reads, “This game is just filled with bot lobbies. Something fishy is going ok here I feel like. I think content creators are getting paid to promote it and play it their live streams.”

The studio behind the game is also now promoting a Solana token on Pump Dot Fun. Which really lays out what’s happening across the AI content industry quite clearly.

It turns out the 2020 crypto boom did fundamentally change the way money worked on the internet, just not in the way its biggest evangelists had hoped. Instead of convincing the general population to embrace Bitcoin and blockchains, it created a new form of grifter capitalism that is spreading across social media, but has become particularly inescapable on Instagram, LinkedIn, and, obviously, X. There you will find vast cyber armies of men telling you “it’s so over,” whether that be Hollywood, social media, or society as a whole. And in their next post they’ll promise you that you too can achieve “generational wealth” and “escape the permanent underclass” if you follow their simple instructions. And almost every time their simple instructions amount to “lie to people on the internet.”

But the AI age has made it extremely hard to tell where you are inside the digital matryoshka doll of lying. Take the new virtual influencer trend, for instance.

Earlier this month, a user on TikTok set up a page titled, “Juanito Bravo,” which is supposed to look like a guy living in Latin America that looks like Johnny Bravo. The comments on a lot of the earlier videos are people asking if it’s AI or not. The account now has around 60,000 followers and its biggest video has been watched 20 million times.

Meanwhile, over on X, a bunch of AI boosters started telling people to make their own AI influencer accounts and using Juanito Bravo as an example. “This 2-day-old AI influencer made with ChatGPT already pulled $13,700 from one clip,” one X account wrote. “Someone created an AI influencer just 2 days ago — and it already has 26K followers, 2.2M likes, and apparently made $13.7K from a single video,” another user wrote.

No idea where these accounts got the $13,700 number from. Maybe they’re in a Discord or a Telegram group and someone paid them to promote it and made up a figure. Either way, let’s count the number of lies happening in this specific example. The person making TikTok videos of a hyperrealistic Latin America Johnny Bravo is lying. The person who said that account was making tens of thousands of dollars is lying. And the X users pressuring you to make an AI character of your own are lying. In fact, one of the X users got a Community Note on his post after he posted and deleted an admission that he only posted about Juanito Bravo to make money from X’s Rewards Program.

Fresh accounts on Instagram and TikTok can’t actually make any money anyways. Which is probably why the Philanthrope account and many of the other AI influencers start shilling crypto coins once they get a viral hit. But, also, these accounts aren’t actually popular once the novelty wears off. Even patient zero for the AI influencer trend, the Jean Philanthrope Instagram account, has lost about 50% of its engagement since people realized it was AI.

The AI-generated “emo bodybuilder” Derek Mercer is seeing the same downward trajectory in his posts, as well. His earliest videos have around two million views, while his more recent ones are lucky to crack 100,000. But that didn’t stop an X user — one based in Eastern Europe running a cryptocurrency Telegram group — from claiming the Mercer account has generated $60,000.

A lot of ink has been spilled about the weird doomsday nerd sex cult running Silicon Valley and all the users suffering from AI psychosis, but not nearly enough has been written about the grifter nihilism that has wormed its way into the heart of not just AI or crypto, but social media, as a whole. The sad Verified dweebs generating fake views, fake money, fake comments, fake reviews, fake shares, fake clips, and now even fake influencers. And I just don’t know how long that can last. If the entire value proposition of social platforms is that, unlike TV or radio or newspapers, it’s able to instantly show us what is actually popular, actually viral, and actually attuned to our personal interests. Then the question is actually how much AI content — and paid-for promotional garbage — will users tolerate before social platforms feel just as fake and astroturfed as TV does?

This week on Panic World, Carson Pace of the Callous Daoboys joins us — and actually came to us with the idea of covering a topic Ryan did not want to touch with a ten foot pole — to talk about a little thing called “gang stalking.” That’s when TIs (“targeted individuals”) believe they’re being followed by someone, or a group of people, through surveillance and harassment...for dubious but nefarious reasons. Eventually, their whole lives can become not just a conspiracy theory, but a conspiracy reality. So naturally, gang stalking is really hot right now online. Check it out!

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We mentioned a couple weeks ago that our consulting arm, GDMI, was working alongside The Onion to support the launch of a new series of videos highlighting America's insane wealth inequality. The project now has found a great way to dramatize just how much richer the 1% and 0.1% are than the rest of us, with a graph that gives a whole new meaning to "infinite scroll."

It's also a great use of a stand-alone website, which you all know I love. You can click here and doomscroll up for yourselves.

Character.AI was an early winner of the AI arms race. It didn’t try and compete with the likes of Claude and ChatGPT by operating as a fully fleshed-out AI agent and, instead, focused on just being a chatbot that could manage different personalities. Which meant that, in a lot of ways, it was the first real consumer-facing AI success story. Though it did drive many of its own users completely insane and is responsible for several suicides.

It filed for chapter 11 this week, making it now the first AI bankruptcy. It is also likely going to be looked back on as one of the first real signs that something was seriously wrong with the AI industry.

404 Media went deep into Character.AI’s finances and they are profoundly mystifying! Character.AI, by the end, was making around $3 million a month and spending $10 million a month just on compute costs. Bruh.

Chinese media is buzzing about microdramas right now, but not for the same reasons American media is buzzing about them. Even though Hollywood has already decided they’re the future of entertainment, across the Great Firewall it seems like the bubble might be starting to pop on the whole industry.

Per some new data from Chinese advertising company DataEye, about 98.7% of microdramas produced in the first half of this year failed to recoup their costs. That’s a startling statistic, especially because these microdramas are meant to be a cheaper and thus safer business. And AI was supposed to make them even safer, but that doesn’t appear to be the case, either.

Much like the huge drop-off in engagement we’ve seen with AI influencers here in the US, AI-generated microdramas are not performing nearly as well as they once were. Chinese audiences are calling it “AI face fatigue.”

Look, I have seen more than a few reporters and cultural commentators make the argument recently that “X/Twitter is so back.” Platformer’s Casey Newton has not only reactivated the Twitter account he stopped using when Elon Musk took over, he’s also written a proper post about how “X/Twitter is so back.”

Newton is calling X a “reverse eternal September,” which is a reference to the old Usenet term for the moment the internet got so popular that there was no longer any kind of monoculture online. In Newton’s version of the argument, “as normies and liberals have decamped for greener pastures, X diehards may account for a larger share of the daily conversation.”

I don’t disagree with that diagnosis of who is still on X, but I do disagree with the idea that “X diehards” are the same kind of people that made Twitter feel like Twitter. And I’d also say that X is actually going to through a profound and possibly permanent eternal September as it slowly onboards every out of touch oligarch and his legion of sycophants jockeying for their attention all day. In fact, I’d also say that there hasn’t been one single day since Musk took over the platform that I haven’t seen some miserable middle-aged edgelord Silicon Valley C-suite doofus share a years-old Twitter or Reddit post that’s been rewritten by some Verified content farmer in the global south and react to it like it was the first time they’ve ever seen it. And I really can’t imagine anything more eternal September than that!

I think the dust has settled enough to finally weigh in on this. Last week, the podcast Emo Kids Anonymous released the “Top 200 Emo Albums of All Time” list. It was voted on by 300 musicians and critics and it dropped like a neutron bomb on my feeds. Which probably says more about my feeds than anything else.

After surveying the discourse all week, though, I think my main takeaway is that older people — millennials, Gen X, and beyond, I guess — are really not prepared for Gen Z and Gen Alpha reappraising and re-canonizing their pop culture. I’ll admit I had some pretty intense gut reactions to EKA’s list of albums — The Hotelier at number one is real weird — but the more I sat with it the more I realized that pop culture did not actually end in 2019 and there is simply no reason why new albums in a nearly 50-year-old genre could be some of the best in that genre. This also applies to everything else.

P.S. here’s an unfortunately really catchy AI-generated ad for dog bowls.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***