AI Slop Melodramas Are Taking Over X—and Their Creators Are Cashing In
AI Slop Melodramas Are Taking Over X—and Their Creators Are Cashing In
AI 生成的“垃圾”情节剧正在占领 X 平台——创作者们正借此大赚一笔
Save this story. For 6 months, my husband convinced everyone that I had stolen millions from the company I built, including our own daughter. As I sat in federal court, certain I was about to lose my freedom, the doors suddenly opened. My 9-year-old son walked in carrying an old blue backpack, looked straight at the judge, and said, “Your Honor. I know who framed my mom. They’re sitting in this room.” 保存这篇报道。六个月来，我丈夫让所有人——包括我们的女儿——都相信我从我一手创办的公司里窃取了数百万美元。当我坐在联邦法庭上，确信自己即将失去自由时，大门突然打开了。我 9 岁的儿子背着一个旧蓝色书包走了进来，直视法官说道：“法官大人，我知道是谁陷害了我妈妈。他们就坐在这个房间里。”
So begins a thread on X that appeared in my feed one day. I knew that the first-person narrator probably didn’t exist, and following this thread would draw me into a mawkish tale where good triumphs over evil. Indeed, the author is not a mother on trial for theft, but a self-identified 21-year-old stock trader in Nigeria, who uses AI to generate stories—and gets paid for it by X. 这就是某天出现在我 X 信息流中的一个推文串的开头。我知道这个第一人称叙述者很可能并不存在，继续读下去只会把我带入一个善有善报的矫情故事中。事实上，作者并非那位因盗窃受审的母亲，而是一位自称居住在尼日利亚的 21 岁股票交易员，他利用 AI 生成这些故事，并因此从 X 平台获得报酬。
I found this out when I began wondering about the proliferation of these compact melodramas of redemption in my feed. It’s probably my own fault; I sometimes idly click on these cheesy stories—you know, just to see what happens next—and the algorithm took notice. In this case, the author is one of countless beneficiaries of X’s Creative Revenue Sharing program, which pays for posts that boost engagement on the platform. 当我开始好奇为什么信息流中充斥着这些简短的救赎情节剧时，我发现了这一点。这可能是我自己的错；我有时会无聊地点开这些俗套的故事——你知道的，只是想看看接下来会发生什么——而算法注意到了这一点。在这种情况下，该作者是 X“创作者收入分成计划”（Creative Revenue Sharing）的无数受益者之一，该计划旨在为提升平台互动率的帖子支付报酬。
To join, a creator must become a Premium X user, have at least 500 verified followers, and have drawn a minimum of 5 million impressions in the last three-month period. The stated goal is to encourage “authentic, high-quality content,” and some of the money surely goes to creators doing just that. 要加入该计划，创作者必须成为 X 的高级会员，拥有至少 500 名认证粉丝，并在过去三个月内获得至少 500 万次展示量。其宣称的目标是鼓励“真实、高质量的内容”，当然，部分资金确实流向了真正创作此类内容的创作者。
But paying for posts that go viral makes the program ripe for exploitation. Some creators in the program engage in “rage baiting,” using outrageous content to draw comments and views. In May 2025, X sued 8 Vietnamese creators and 25 “John Does,” alleging that they fraudulently drew money from the program by posting phony AI-generated content and then boosting engagement by bot-driven comments. 但为病毒式传播的帖子付费，使得该计划极易被滥用。该计划中的一些创作者从事“愤怒诱导”（rage baiting），利用令人愤慨的内容来吸引评论和浏览量。2025 年 5 月，X 起诉了 8 名越南创作者和 25 名“无名氏”，指控他们通过发布虚假的 AI 生成内容，并利用机器人驱动的评论来提升互动，从而从该计划中骗取资金。
In April, X moved to cut the payments of “aggregators” who primarily posted news from other sources, and threatened sanctions against those who overused the BREAKING tag to draw eyeballs. On July 16 of this year, X revealed that it had removed millions of posts that purloined already-published content posted by others. 今年 4 月，X 采取行动削减了主要发布其他来源新闻的“聚合者”的报酬，并威胁要制裁那些过度使用“突发新闻”（BREAKING）标签来博取眼球的用户。今年 7 月 16 日，X 透露已删除了数百万条窃取他人已发布内容的帖子。
It’s not clear how X regards the AI-generated story slop that has infected my feed. (The company, now part of xAI—which is itself now part of SpaceX—would not answer my questions about this.) Most of the stories are falsely presented as true first-person narratives, though it’s pretty obvious that they are fabricated. In many cases, the creators describe themselves in their profile as storytellers. It’s hard to prove that the actual authors are AI models, but the vast majority bear the signs. The posts are manipulative and dumb and anything but authentic. 目前尚不清楚 X 如何看待这些充斥我信息流的 AI 生成“垃圾”故事。（该公司现隶属于 xAI——而 xAI 本身又是 SpaceX 的一部分——并未回答我关于此事的提问。）大多数故事被虚假地呈现为真实的第一人称叙述，尽管显而易见它们是编造的。在许多情况下，创作者在个人资料中将自己描述为“讲故事的人”。虽然很难证明实际作者就是 AI 模型，但绝大多数帖子都带有明显的 AI 特征。这些帖子具有操纵性且愚蠢，绝非真实内容。
Rob Cover, a professor at Australia’s RMIT Digital Ethnography Research Centre who studies AI-generated content, broke down the structure of these posts for me in an email. It’s as formalized as a sonnet. First comes a rage-baiting setup, “in which an innocent person is wrongfully fired, evicted, scammed, loses their rightful place on public transport, or is the subject of judicial overreach.” This is followed by a turnaround: “The underdog is redeemed while the adversary is defeated, humiliated, and shamed (often as a representation of a public shaming),” says Cover. 澳大利亚皇家墨尔本理工大学（RMIT）数字民族志研究中心研究 AI 生成内容的教授罗伯·科弗（Rob Cover）在邮件中为我解析了这些帖子的结构。它像十四行诗一样格式化：首先是愤怒诱导的铺垫，“一个无辜的人被错误解雇、驱逐、诈骗，在公共交通工具上失去了应有的座位，或是遭受司法越权。”随后是一个转折：“弱者得到救赎，而对手被击败、羞辱和蒙羞（通常表现为一种公开羞辱），”科弗说。
In many of these tales, narrators are in possession of sealed documents that turn the table on tormentors, often in divorce disputes or the execution of a relative’s estate. Or it could be something as simple as an airline passenger who fiercely retains their assigned seat when rude moochers lay claim to it—and the adversary suffers a walk of shame to the back of the plane. 在许多此类故事中，叙述者掌握着能让折磨者反受其害的密封文件，通常涉及离婚纠纷或亲属遗产执行。或者情节可能很简单：一位飞机乘客在面对无礼的占座者时坚决捍卫自己的座位，最终对手在众目睽睽之下尴尬地走向机舱后部。
These stories are shockingly popular, routinely garnering hundreds of thousands—sometimes millions—of views, and routinely get hundreds of likes and dozens of reposts. (Some of that might be bot traffic.) Those numbers reveal something about ourselves: a hunger for fairness, a lust for retribution. Reading them gives a jolt of dopamine as justice prevails. The AI knows it and reliably churns out content we can’t resist. 这些故事出奇地受欢迎，通常能获得数十万甚至数百万的浏览量，并经常获得数百个点赞和数十次转发。（其中一些可能是机器人流量。）这些数字揭示了我们自身的一些特质：对公平的渴望，对报复的渴求。阅读这些故事时，正义得到伸张带来的多巴胺冲击让人欲罢不能。AI 深谙此道，并可靠地炮制出我们无法抗拒的内容。
Jenna Russell, a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland who is studying AI writing, tells me that it’s blindingly simple to generate those mini-melodramas. “I think these spammers have simply optimized for the least effort and the most engagement, which means using easy, well-known tropes and prompting AI to write something that fits the bill,” she says. 马里兰大学研究 AI 写作的博士候选人珍娜·拉塞尔（Jenna Russell）告诉我，生成这些迷你情节剧极其简单。“我认为这些垃圾信息发送者只是优化了流程，以最少的努力换取最大的互动，这意味着使用简单、众所周知的套路，并提示 AI 写出符合要求的内容，”她说。
That certainly is the case with the person who goes by the handle BIGBEN, who posted the climactic courtroom scene. He was the only person among the multiple storytellers I contacted who answered my DM invitation to tell me how they worked. At first he didn’t seem to understand how a journalistic exchange worked; he thought I was suggesting a partnership. If we uploaded his stories to Backchannel, he suggested, I could generate cash flow from my end. I explained that this scheme wouldn’t work for WIRED. I just wanted to hear how he worked, “Before I give out my leverage, what’s in it for me?” he asked. 发布那个法庭高潮场景、网名为 BIGBEN 的人就是这种情况。在我联系的多位讲故事的人中，他是唯一一个回复我的私信邀请并告诉我他们如何运作的人。起初，他似乎不明白新闻交流是怎么回事；他以为我在提议合作。他建议，如果我们把他的故事上传到 Backchannel，我就可以从中产生现金流。我解释说这种方案对《连线》（WIRED）行不通。我只是想了解他的工作方式，“在我交出我的筹码之前，我能得到什么好处？”他问道。
Nonetheless, BIGBEN, who claimed he was a 21-year-old trader living in Nigeria, did share his process. Though he contended that some stories come from experiences that people shared with him, he fessed up to using AI to write for him. When it’s time to make up a new story, he says, he gives just Grok or ChatGPT a prompt. The first post in a story thread he posted earlier this week, presumably narrated by a second wife abused by her in-laws, notched 1.5 million views in two days. X pays him every two weeks as part of its Creative Revenue Sharing program. BIGBEN says the paychecks are usually between $500 and $700. Others report earning thousands of dollars in each cycle. 尽管如此，自称是居住在尼日利亚的 21 岁交易员 BIGBEN 还是分享了他的流程。虽然他声称有些故事来自人们分享给他的经历，但他承认使用 AI 代笔。他说，当需要编造一个新故事时，他只需给 Grok 或 ChatGPT 一个提示词。他本周早些时候发布的一个故事串的开头，讲述了一个被姻亲虐待的继室的故事，在两天内获得了 150 万次浏览。作为“创作者收入分成计划”的一部分，X 每两周向他支付一次报酬。BIGBEN 说，支票金额通常在 500 到 700 美元之间。其他人则报告称每个周期能赚取数千美元。
Compared to X posts involving rage, misinformation, porn, and stolen content, these stories of protagonist redemption and villain-shaming are fairly harmless. And if you’re curious… 与 X 上涉及愤怒、虚假信息、色情和窃取内容的帖子相比，这些关于主角救赎和反派蒙羞的故事相当无害。如果你感到好奇……