This Arizona creator posts viral AI-generated videos. He says there's no good future with AI

The new Sora app from OpenAI, released last week, sits at the top of Apple’s app store rankings. Sora lets users quickly generate AI videos in pretty much any style, meaning our social media feeds could soon feature a lot more realistic-looking — and yet not real — videos.

This genre has been dubbed "AI slop." But despite the name, the videos can generate millions of views — and money for some of the people posting them. One of those people is a Valley resident named Eric; he asked us not to use his last name for safety reasons.

Eric is the person behind Infinite Unreality and posts AI generated videos on several platforms. He came by the studio recently to talk about this and started the conversation by talking about what he thinks of the phrase that’s used to describe what he does: AI slop.

Full conversation

ERIC: AI slop, man. I mean, it's definitely a negative term. Sounds negative, but at the same time I think it's, I think it's valid. I mean, it's just at the rate that you can pump out AI content. It has to be slop compared to what people are actually making out there with their hands.

So, you know, I don't take it too critically because I don't really have a ton of, I'm not spending hours and hours every day on this stuff, so I don't really have that much of an opinion on it. But yeah, I mean, I think it's just one of those terms that people use and it's kind of just become a popular term.

MARK BRODIE: But it doesn't bother you, it doesn't sound like.

ERIC: No, it doesn't bother me at all.

BRODIE: What appeals to you about doing this?

ERIC: Well, I don't know if you know about why I started doing it. Just to get views. That was really.

BRODIE: It was really about attention?

ERIC: It was really about attention. I had a YouTube channel when I was younger and I just, I've always kind of wanted to keep doing that. I mean, almost anybody, if you send them a bunch of likes and follows to their account, they're gonna go, wow, this is amazing, right?

I mean, there's a feeling, there's a dopamine rush that you get from that. And that's kind of what I was always craving. But at the same time, I didn't want to put a ton of work into it. And so I just figured, what is the easiest way for me to get followers with the minimal or the least amount of effort as possible?

BRODIE: Is there a goal though, to do something with those followers? Or is it just about accumulating views, accumulating likes and clicks?

ERIC: I mean, ultimately I saw it as a possibility to make some money off of it, but as it's come along and I've gotten followers and stuff, I kind of realized that monetizing the actual videos themselves is not really possible.

But then again, it is a very unique niche. There's a lot of companies that are looking to use generative AI for marketing and whatnot. So there's a lot of value just when it comes to consultations and commission work even. So that's kind of where all the money comes in.

Long term goal, I don't really know. I don't have any plans to expand it necessarily. I thought maybe it could be some sort of a video production company, but who knows?

Things are changing so quickly. In my personal opinion, I don't think it's going to exist in a year from now, really. My channel, I think it's going to, at least if it exists, it's going to be something completely different.

BRODIE: How come?

ERIC: It's going so fast. Things are changing. Just, it's, there's not gonna be anything unique about it here soon enough, so.

BRODIE: Because everybody's gonna be able to do.

ERIC: It, everybody's gonna be able to do it.

BRODIE: How do you try to figure out what kinds of videos you're gonna make?

ERIC: So I don't come up with any of the ideas.

BRODIE: You just type it into like ChatGPT.

ERIC: Yeah, so when I started, obviously I was taking other videos that I saw that were doing really well and I said, let me try to replicate those. Just get the style down more than anything. And then over time it just kind of started to understand what I was looking for. And then I started feeding it the data of my recent videos and what videos did well.

And it just kind of adapted towards shock value and bizarre stuff and just trying to get as many views as possible. So all I do is I open my chat that I have and I say more and it just gives me more prompts and we just go from there.

BRODIE: So like, what is your role in putting them together? Because it sounds like the AI is coming up with the ideas. The AI is obviously generating the images. Are, are you just posting them? Is that, is that basically the extent of what you're doing?

ERIC: It's pretty much like that for the most part. I mean there's, there's different steps along the way and obviously AI is doing those steps fully, but I kind of have to bring it from step one to step two.

BRODIE: Are you concerned about people watching your videos and thinking that they're real in any way?

ERIC: No. That's what I want.

BRODIE: You want them to think they're real?

ERIC: That's what I want. That's what draws engagement. I mean, I think a lot of them are very bizarre to the point and even so unrealistic to where there's no way it could possibly be real. But just the fact that it's shot in a realistic style and it's that handheld camera kind of feel, I just kind of knew that people would think it's real.

And as long as I get them for the first two, three seconds of that, that just drives the engagement up. And that, that's the whole point, is just keeping people on the video as long as possible.

BRODIE: Are you not concerned about people thinking that something that is AI generated is real?

ERIC: Not necessarily. Unless it actually can harm people, I guess. Unless there's something of real substantial value to that mindset. I don't think I'm really, I mean, maybe I'm traumatizing people in a sense. Maybe they go, "oh my God, that's real" and it's not actually real. And they never get that answer. And maybe they're forever scarred because the baby had, you know, four heads or whatever.

I don't know. I mean, that's, that's definitely a possibility, but for the most part, I'm not trying to trick people. I'm not. I label all my videos AI. You know, I abide by the rules as much as possible with that. It's just a matter of, are people — and I think a lot of people just don't really pay attention to social media as much.

BRODIE: So one of the videos that you've created that seems to have been pretty popular is there's a woman at a gate at an airport with a kangaroo holding a boarding pass. And the woman and the gate agent are speaking in, I don't know if it's a foreign language or a made-up AI language, but it looks like the woman is trying to get the kangaroo on the plane because it's holding a boarding pass.

And it strikes me like, listening to you talk, that if people think that's real, they might think, what kind of madness is this? Somebody trying to get a kangaroo on an airplane. And also, who would get them a boarding pass?

But also, like, it's not totally outside the realm of possibility that somebody would try to do something like that, right.

ERIC: I think that's the reason why the video did so well, is because it was one of those videos that looked really realistic, but it also wasn't unbelievable by any means. It wasn't too farfetched.

I mean, I think a lot of people just thought it was a skit. And so the reason why it blew up was because, you know, they saw it, they're like, oh, this is a cute little skit. Let's move along.

And then somebody posts, oh, did you know the Kangaroo video was AI? Then everybody freaks out. 500 million views in 24 hours.

BRODIE: Wow. Is that your highest viewed?

ERIC: Not personally, but that was one of those videos where it got stolen by almost every single account reposted. You know, I think I have 20 million on my account, but I counted every single other one. It was about 500 million, 24 hours. Wow.

BRODIE: So what does that do for the other videos that you make? Like, that seems like a really high bar to try to clear in the future.

ERIC: I mean, I have 30, 40 videos that have done better than that on my channel.

BRODIE: Really. Wow.

ERIC: Yeah. When it comes to, like, a global reach, that's definitely done the most. And I don't know if it'll ever kind of reach that again. Just because that video really kind of made people realize that AI videos can look realistic. And I don't think there's that kind of shock factor anymore.

BRODIE: Do you make any money off the videos you post?

ERIC: Not from the videos themselves. On YouTube, I could do it, but YouTube, I don't get any views for whatever reason. I've had people steal my videos and post them on YouTube and get millions of views. For some reason I can't get it.

So all the money just comes from commission work and, you know, consultations and stuff like that.

BRODIE: And have you gotten gigs from other people who have seen the AI videos you're doing and like them and said, please come do that for us?

ERIC: Yeah, yeah, I've gotten many, many, many companies. Moreso just from a consultation standpoint, just kind of them coming to me and saying, is this possible to do with AI? Because I think they're just, everybody's trying to utilize it as much as possible because it can. I can create a video for 400 bucks that, you know, would cost these production companies tens of thousands of dollars to hire actors and all that stuff, so.

BRODIE: And presumably it doesn't take you all that long to do this, right?

ERIC: It takes me, well, if you're talking about the videos on my channel, it takes me two seconds. If you're talking about those things, I mean, 10 minutes. My AI knows the videos that I want. Most people want videos that I make or videos similar to that.

So I tell my AI, here's these people who are reaching out for this reason. I feed it all the information. It comes up with everything for me, even on the, yeah, commissions and all that stuff.

BRODIE: So has your AI ever generated anything that you, for whatever reason, didn't want to post? Like you didn't think it was appropriate or you weren't comfortable with it?

ERIC: Plenty of times. Yeah. It happens all the time. For the most part, it knows, it knows the rules. It knows kind of what Instagram allows and what it doesn't. I'm also on TikTok. You know, I'm on every platform. They all kind of allow the same stuff.

BRODIE: So you have to make sure that it's not violating the rules of the platform you're on.

ERIC: But it's difficult because there's a lot of things that my videos portray that, if it was a real video, would not be allowed. But because it's not a real video and it's technically art, I don't know if they know how to even moderate it. You know, it's happened so fast and so quick. I mean, I don't know.

BRODIE: What do you think the future of AI looks like?

ERIC: I think it's going to be, It's going to be good early, and then it's going to be bad.

BRODIE: Is now the early time, you think?

ERIC: No, I think now is early early.

BRODIE: OK.

ERIC: I think within 10, 10 years from now, 20, 35, our lives are going to be completely different.

BRODIE: How so?

ERIC: I have a theory that in 10 years from now, we're not going to have to work. I think there's going to have to be some sort of universal basic income. And, you know, even with that, I don't know how people are going to be satisfied with life. I don't know.

BRODIE: Because AI will be doing everything.

ERIC: Because AI will be doing everything. And even though we're going to be able to live and eat and not have to work, what else are we going to be doing with our time?

We're not going to be using social media because social media is going to disappear because there's so much AI generated videos that nobody wanted to be on the platforms anymore.

You're going to go on Netflix and it's going to say, hey, what kind of movie you want to watch today? And it's going to give you 10 different versions of whatever you want to watch, and you just watch whatever. And maybe you own that movie and you can share it to your friends, but there's going to be just so much media. It's, yeah, it's insane.

BRODIE: It's so interesting because the future you're describing strikes me as at the same time utopian and dystopian, like, all in one.

ERIC: Yeah, it's tough to really know how it's going to be because, I mean, I could speak about this all day, but there's a few different outcomes. None of them are good. None of them are good.

BRODIE: Do you think that you're contributing to that, though?

ERIC: I guess to a small scale? I mean, I think that's probably the reason why I get a lot of death threats all the time, is just the fact that I'm utilizing it. But then again, everybody else in this world is going to have to use AI or else they're going to fall behind.

You got to look at it in the perspective that everything is going to be easier with AI. And I don't think I'm a bad actor. I could easily be a bad actor if I wanted to be. I'm one of probably the 10 biggest AI creators, video creators in the U.S.

I could make any sort of propaganda video that I want and trick millions. That's not my intent, that's not my goal. But I just think people need to be aware that these things are possible. Whether it's videos, audio, you know, emails, whatever it is. Just you have to be aware of what's possible in this day and age.

BRODIE: Well, this is what I think scares the bejeepers out of a lot of people, is that you can make these videos and you can make them look really realistic and you can have whoever you want saying whatever you want them to be saying.

And for at least some number of people, they're not gonna know the difference. They're not gonna know if you have person X saying this or politician Y or athlete or musician saying something that they didn't actually say.

So, like, is there a way to reassure people? Is there a way to convince them that you're not gonna go rogue and start making propaganda videos that are intended to mislead people?

ERIC: I mean, I can say that I'm not gonna do it. I don't think me as a person really means anything. I don't think there's anything special about me. I'm not a genius. I just decided to jump on it at the right time. And I mean, that's obviously a big factor in doing anything, is just doing.

Anybody could do it. It's just if they care enough to look into it.

BRODIE: But presumably, not everybody has the mentality that you have. They don't have the morals or the ethics that you have. And they are willing to.

I mean, we've seen it, right? We've seen people having famous videos of famous people where they are words coming out of their mouth that they never actually said.

ERIC: Yeah, no, I see it all the time. And a lot of it's, for the most part, it's comedic purposes. It's them saying something completely outrageous that it would never be believable. Of course, there's always going to be people believing everything, just that's the way it is.

But, yeah, I mean, I think what we really got to hope for is that AI is good at detecting AI and we can utilize that AI to recognize all these things and hopefully keep our platform safe.

But things are going to change, and they might change for the good short term, but long term, who knows?

BRODIE: Buckle up, huh?

ERIC: Buckle up. Buckle up. Yeah.