Shrimp Jesus and the Infinite Content Treadmill

There’s a special kind of loneliness you can only feel while scrolling a feed that won’t stop screaming at you. Not human screaming. Algorithm screaming. The app isn’t showing you what your friends are doing; it’s showing you what the slot machine thinks will keep your thumb twitching. And now the slot machine has learned to hallucinate.

The latest headline parade—shrimp Jesus, Ghibli deportations, obese AI Olympians, exploding pressure cookers, cat soap operas, and yes, “erotic tractors”—isn’t just “people are weird online.” People have always been weird online. The difference is that the weird used to cost time. Now it costs electricity and a moral shrug. The internet has become an all-you-can-eat buffet where the food is technically edible, spiritually plastic, and served by a robot that’s insulted you three times while smiling.

“AI slop” is the perfect phrase because it sounds like something you hose out of a trough. It’s not art. It’s not even bad art with a pulse. It’s content product, squeezed out at scale, engineered for the soft underbelly of your brain. Bright colors, familiar brands, fake sincerity, fake outrage, fake miracles, fake animals doing fake drama. It’s like the internet finally achieved its destiny: a perpetual motion machine powered by attention and boredom at the same time.

The algorithm doesn’t want truth, it wants reflexes

The article frames it right: calling this purely a “tech” story is missing the point. The real director of this circus is the engagement algorithm, that blind little god that rewards whatever makes your amygdala sit up like a dog hearing a treat bag crinkle.

That’s why shrimp Jesus worked. It’s sacrilege without consequences. It’s religious iconography, but with a crustacean twist that turns reverence into a gag. You don’t have to be Catholic or even awake to understand it. It lands in the brain as: holy thing + wrong thing = stop scrolling. Same reason “122-year-old grandma birthday vlog” pops off. It pushes two ancient buttons: “I’m witnessing something rare” and “I should show someone this.” Meanwhile it’s just a synthetic face flapping over a synthetic story read by a synthetic voice, and the only real organism involved is you, absorbing it like secondhand smoke.

And cats. Always cats. Cats are the universal remote control for human attention. You can change the channel in any language with a cat. A cat in a courtroom, a cat having an affair, a cat raising a family, a cat committing tax fraud. None of it happened. All of it performs.

The great aesthetic laundering: “Ghiblification” and other crimes

Then came the Ghibli wave—taking real photos, sometimes of real suffering, and rendering them in a style associated with tenderness, wonder, hand-drawn care. If you wanted to build a machine that turns history into a scented candle, that’s a pretty efficient method. Studio Ghibli is basically visual comfort food: soft edges, warm light, a sense that the world is tragic but worth loving. Applying that to deportations is like putting a lullaby over footage of a bar fight.

And here’s the grim comedy: the whole trend was enabled by a company shipping a new image generator, and the CEO apparently slapped the style on his profile like it was a seasonal beverage. The man is running a factory that can counterfeit vibes at scale, and he’s doing the “look how cute” routine while the original artist has called this stuff an insult to life itself. That’s not a disagreement, that’s two species talking past each other.

What gets me isn’t even the copyright part—though the “we totally didn’t train on it” dance is getting old. It’s the aesthetic laundering. You take anything—war, poverty, police violence, exploitation—and you run it through the Pretty Filter until it’s palatable enough to share without guilt. The machine doesn’t care what it’s depicting. It cares what it’s optimizing.

Slop is a labor story wearing a clown nose

The most honest part of the article is the part that makes everyone uncomfortable: AI slop is work. Not noble work, not fulfilling work, but work in the same way digging ditches is work, except the ditch is inside your soul and the shovel is a subscription plan.

A lot of people want to frame slop makers as villains: “content farmers,” “grifters,” “trash merchants.” Sure. Some are. But the bigger villain is the economy that turns “making the internet worse” into one of the more rational ways to pay rent.

When regular labor yields dwindling returns and the winners are a handful of platforms and a handful of “creators,” the obvious move is to buy a lottery ticket. AI is the new scratch-off. You don’t need a studio, you don’t need a team, you don’t need a decade learning composition or editing or writing. You need a pipeline. Prompts in, slop out. Post it, test it, iterate. Lose your dignity in small, measurable increments until something hits.

And if you’re in a country where the local currency has the structural integrity of wet cardboard, the temptation is even stronger. A few hundred bucks a month from an American platform isn’t “side hustle,” it’s oxygen.

Oleksandr’s factory: 930 channels and a dream

The piece follows one guy in Ukraine, Oleksandr, who went from debt and personal wreckage to running a sprawling operation: hundreds of channels, a team, monetization whack-a-mole. He started with AI music over “sexy AI girls,” because of course he did. Sex sells, and it sells even better when it’s imaginary and never says no.

Then he found what the algorithm really loves: long “life stories” read aloud, a kind of synthetic bedtime radio for people who want companionship without the mess of other humans. “Grandparents listen to it before bed,” he says, which is the most depressing sentence I’ve read in a while. Not because grandparents are listening—because the companionship is being piped in by a machine that doesn’t know what a grandparent is.

He also found “vulgar adult themes,” including the phrase that deserves to be engraved on a monument to our era: erotic tractors.

There’s something almost poetic about that. The tractor is a symbol of real work, real earth, real machinery doing real labor. And here it is, forced into digital lingerie to get past an ad system. It’s like the internet looked at honest agriculture and said, “Nice. Now make it horny.”

Oleksandr explains the logic in plain terms: to make money, spend as little as possible. That’s not a personal philosophy; it’s the platform’s business model tattooed onto his workflow. Quantity beats quality because the algorithm is a numbers guy. Art takes time. Slop scales.

The platforms are both the casino and the cop

Here’s the twist that makes it truly modern: the same platforms that reward the slop also punish it arbitrarily. Oleksandr’s channels get blocked, demonetized, nuked. Sometimes for clear reasons (adult content, copyright bait). Sometimes because the automated moderation system woke up on the wrong side of the server rack.

So creators adapt. They make content that’s risky because it’s more profitable, and they build systems to replace what gets deleted. It’s not even “cat and mouse” anymore. It’s “industrial pest control.” The platform sprays poison, the roaches evolve, everyone gets sick, and the house still belongs to the landlord.

And the platform line is always the same: “Generative AI is a tool… high-quality content… community guidelines.” Sure. And a slot machine is just a cabinet with lights. Nobody is forcing you to pull the lever. Except the whole place is built so pulling the lever is the only activity that feels like it exists.

Why it feels so bad to look at

People ask why AI slop is so viscerally repulsive. The hands are better now. The faces don’t melt like wax as often. The videos can be slick. So why does it still feel like eating packing peanuts?

Because it’s contextless. Human-made “bad content” still carries a fingerprint: someone chose it, someone meant something, someone failed in a specific direction. Slop fails in a smooth, frictionless way. It’s optimized to trigger and vanish. It doesn’t want to be remembered. It wants to be clicked.

It’s also emotionally dishonest in a way the brain can sense. The video begs for empathy, awe, outrage, arousal—whatever pays—without earning any of it. It’s the performance of meaning without the inconvenience of meaning. Like a counterfeit bill that passes the first glance but feels wrong in the hand.

And because it’s cheap to make, it breeds like flies. There’s no scarcity. No “you have to be good to be seen.” The bar is: can you generate, post, and test faster than the other guy. The result is an internet that looks like it’s dreaming, but it’s actually sleepwalking.

The coming flood: personalized slop, made just for your weaknesses

If you think shrimp Jesus is the peak, you’re underestimating our capacity for spiritual self-harm. The next phase is slop that’s tailored—your favorite art style, your favorite celebrity, your local news anchors, your politics, your fears. Not one viral tractor, but a tractor engineered for you: the exact level of erotic that slips past your conscious defenses while still making your thumb stop.

The grim part is that the platform doesn’t even need to “decide” to do this. It just needs to keep optimizing engagement. The machine will discover, like water finding cracks, the precise content that makes you linger. It will learn the face you trust, the tone that calms you, the story arc that makes you share. Then it’ll produce it endlessly. Not because it hates you. Because it doesn’t know what you are.

At some point, the internet becomes less like a library or a town square and more like a casino with mirrors. You walk in looking for information and leave with a pocket full of glitter and the vague sense you lost an hour.

What to do besides scream into the feed

I don’t have a clean solution. Anyone selling a clean solution is trying to sell you something. But a few ugly truths help:

1. Platforms won’t fix this out of moral awakening. They’ll fix it only if it threatens the business: advertiser trust, regulatory heat, user flight. Otherwise slop is just “engagement.”

2. Watermarking and detection won’t save us. The slop makers will route around it like they route around takedowns. The people who share it don’t care if it’s real; they care if it hits.

3. The economic driver matters. When millions of people are pushed into hustle ecosystems, they will produce whatever the market rewards, including unreality. If you want less slop, you need fewer desperate creators and less predatory monetization.

In the meantime, you can build small defenses: be stingy with your attention, unfollow the rage bait, don’t share the miracle grandma, don’t reward the fake. Treat your feed like your lungs in a burning building. Inhale less. And when you do inhale, choose something that tastes like it came from an actual human mess.

Because the saddest part isn’t that the internet is filling up with erotic tractors and shrimp messiahs. The saddest part is that this is what happens when a species that craves meaning builds a meaning-machine and then hires it to run a billboard network.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to pour something brown into a glass and watch something made by a person who had to sleep at some point.

Source: From shrimp Jesus to erotic tractors: how viral AI slop took over the internet