AI 'Slop Videos' Worsen, Fail to Deliver

OpenAI released Sora 2 and a smartphone app in September 2025, triggering initial concerns about job displacement across Hollywood.

Despite initial fears, the technology functioned more as a gimmick, and these anxieties about job displacement proved largely unfounded.

OpenAI ultimately shut down Sora within six months of its launch, following significant financial losses.

The Wall Street Millennial reported that the initial fears regarding AI slot videos were unfounded, describing the technology as nothing more than a gimmick.

In July 2025, Particle Six unveiled its AI actress, Tilly Norwood, across YouTube, Instagram, and a dedicated website, encountering an overwhelmingly negative initial response.

The YouTube reveal video alone amassed over 2,000 critical comments, with the main sentiment from commenters expressing relief at the atrocious quality of the AI-generated video, perceiving it as an indicator that their jobs remained safe in the short term.

The host of Wall Street Millennial, however, suggested that Cowen's preference for sterile, corporate-controlled content remains a fringe opinion within the show business industry.

Particle Six employs distinct processes for video creation and live interviews, utilizing a variety of AI video generation tools such as Google's Veo 3 and ByteDance's SeaDream for video production.

Tilly Norwood's system integrates Tavus for avatar mouth movements based on a static image, while Google's Gemini LLM generates the content of her responses.

Particle Six likely pre-loads Gemini with a context document to define Tilly's personality, creating an amalgamation of text generation, text-to-speech via ElevenLabs, and avatar animation.

The film's narrative depicts Tilly Norwood as an AI system that eventually gains a physical form, with creators arranging interviews on major news outlets in the US and the UK to generate buzz, despite no official release date being set as the project remains in early production stages.

During a CBS interview, Tilly Norwood expressed a preference for 'Titanic' era Leonardo DiCaprio, and when questioned about AI destroying humanity, she sidestepped the concern by stating it was 'above my pay grade'.

The interviewer noted that the bot occasionally failed to respond smoothly and misunderstood some questions, yet Particle Six assured them that this represented the 'worst the tech will ever be,' promising massive improvements over the next six months.

During an interview, Tilly Norwood abruptly began speaking Chinese and then impersonating Piers Morgan, prompting Morgan to ask about the sudden and random change.

The creator attributed this error to wires getting 'crossed' within the complex system, leading the host to emphasize that compounding multiple AI tools inherently increases the probability of such system errors.

Current video generation technology limits clips to approximately 30 seconds before a noticeable drop in quality occurs, rendering longer productions challenging.

Audiences generally hold a negative perception of AI art, making a boycott of AI-generated productions a likely commercial threat, further evidenced by the emergence of 'anti-Tilly' merchandise reflecting public pushback against the replacement of human staff.

The legal status of AI-generated work remains a significant hurdle, as AI artwork is currently not copyrightable in the US, a principle established in 2022 when the Copyright Office denied a copyright claim for an AI-generated piece of art.

Dwayne Johnson's production team considered using a deepfake version of Johnson for specific scenes but ultimately decided against it due to two primary concerns.

These concerns included potential PR backlash from fans and actors' unions, as well as significant legal hurdles related to intellectual property rights, leading them to avoid AI out of caution.

This historical drama about the American Revolutionary War began in January 2026, releasing 18 short episodes, each lasting 3-6 minutes, which are distributed for free on Time magazine's YouTube channel, a venture reportedly bankrolled by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who owns Time.

Despite leveraging AI, each episode of 'On This Day 1776' requires weeks of labor to curate short, usable clips from AI outputs.

The production involves approximately 35 staff members, including 30 production personnel, many of whom are unionized, leading to an estimated cost of $140,000 per episode, or $28,000 per minute, primarily driven by human labor and computing power.

Audience reception for the series has been overwhelmingly negative, with common criticisms citing poor quality, highlighting the ironic inefficiency and high costs associated with AI video production despite the technology's promise of automation.

The significantly higher production costs, coupled with the lack of copyrightability for AI-generated video, severely questions the commercial viability and value of such projects, leading the Wall Street Millennial to describe video generation as the most offensive and least economically promising segment of the AI bubble.