AI Slop: "True Crime" that isn't true, or a crime

The onslaught of AI shit is accelerating, and the recent decline and fall of a popular True Crime channel on Youtube is the tip of the iceberg. I fear that we as a society will soon be like The Matrix

Feb 14, 2025

A ‘True Crime’ Documentary Series Has Millions of Views. The Murders Are All AI-Generated

I recently posted about the infiltration of AI generated music to Youtube, and some of the tell-tales of genre.

And, while I am not on Facebook anymore, I am made aware that it is awash with click-bait-y videos and content, all to drive people to keep scrolling and getting their eyeballs on the massive wall of ads that drives their revenues.

But this reporting out of 404media, “A ‘True Crime’ Documentary Series Has Millions of Views. The Murders Are All AI-Generated” is about a now-offline Youtube channel that posted 100% AI generated stories, but they were all created with AI, the characters were fake, and it is all formulaic, as discovered by a reporter from the Denver Post:

Elizabeth Hernandez found out about the decade-old murder from a flurry of tips sent to her newsroom in August last year.
The tips were all reacting to a YouTube video with a shocking title: "Husband's Secret Gay Love Affair with Step Son Ends in Grisly Murder.” It described a gruesome crime that apparently took place in Littleton, Colorado. Almost two million people had watched it.
“Some people in fact were saying, ‘Why didn't The Denver Post cover this?’” Hernandez, a reporter at the paper, told me. “Because in the video, it makes it sound like it was a big news event and yet, when you Google it, there is no coverage.”
The reason for the lack of coverage was pretty clear to her. In the 26-minute long video, a stilted voice narrated over hazy still images of a neighborhood that really didn’t look like Littleton.

So, people who are true crime aficionados on YT were consuming this content, and they decided to look up the details, especially people who live in the communities that these ‘crimes’ occurred in.

And when they didn’t find them, they become rather upset.

More from the linked article:

The plots were disturbing, often hypersexual. They described parents selling teenagers into sex slavery with a sheriff, and transgender teachers committing murders to hide affairs with students. The video thumbnails were perverse, with clickbaity phrasing in big blocky text.
Other titles included:
“Sheriff Murdered After Affair With His Secretary Got Exposed” with 30,000 views.
“Wife Secret Affair with Neighbor’s Teenage Daughter Ends in Grisly Murder” with 34,000 views.
“Coach Gives Cheerleader HIV after Secret Affair, Leading to Pregnancy” with 10,000 views.

Super saucy stuff there. Hell, I might click on some of those. They tick all my crime binging hallmarks.

The creator of the page and the person who created the videos, named Paul for this (but not his name) had this to say:

I was curious about how his whole operation worked. Paul is not the first person to lie on the internet, but it felt like he was lying in a brand-new way. Paul had found his own niche within the AI-generated slop ecosystem that 404 Media has reported on for the last few months. He believed people wouldn’t want to watch his videos if they knew they were fake, and that he wasn’t any worse than the competition.
“True crime, it’s entertainment masquerading as news […] that's all there is to it,” he said.

His motivation for this is that he graduated from Uni just before COVID hit, and had to move back home, and he watched a lot of … Dateline. And that heavy diet of addictive drove him to recognize the formula:

Paul mapped out the formula for the genre as he watched: a scandalous affair, some brutal crime, interrogating the suspects and a stunning trial of a perpetrator to bring things home.

Lather, rinse, repeat. As an avid consumer of shows from the 1990s like The FBI Files, and Forensic Files, this tracks.

So, bored out of his skull during Covid, he turned to ChatGPT, and other tools to create the script, the story board, and the visuals. Use an AI narrator to read the script, and generated images that aren’t quite real, but together, this is very plausible.

It is just 100% fake.

The takeaway: Going forward, you are going to see an arms race of fake content that will become indistinguishable from reality, until you look into the details. But the tool to debunk, Google, and other search providers are increasingly using AI summaries, AI summaries that are about as accurate as a normal ChatGPT query1, so what can go wrong?

This gets me to the crux: We are well on the way to the AI being the AI in the 1999 movie, The Matrix.

The Wachowski sisters were remarkably prescient. Heaven help us.

I will admit that using ChatGPT will give you very good answers, but if you ask it questions you know the answer to, you will easily find hallucinations, but if you aren’t knowledgeable about the topic, the chatbot will give you an answer you will believe, and that can cause chaos.