AI-made shorts are multiplying on Instagram Reels and TikTok, flooding feeds with bizarre clips that creators can churn out in minutes at a pace traditional artists and animators say they can’t match.
That pressure falls hardest on people who build work by hand, frame by frame.
Hugo Zbor, a graphic designer and animator, said he can spend days polishing a single piece as he carefully crafts the world his work belongs in.
“The best aspects of worldbuilding are to keep things consistent in terms of emotions you get from viewing the piece,” Zbor said. “If your work consistently conveys a specific emotion… and does that well, you feel like you’re in that world.”
Zbor said that kind of consistency — the tiny decisions that add up over time — is what makes his work feel handmade, even if most viewers don’t stop long enough to notice them.
But the feed does not reward patience.
Spend a few minutes scrolling, and the pattern becomes hard-to-miss: quick-cut shorts with simplistic animation, synthetic voices, images that look plausible until you stare at the hands, the lettering and the edges of faces. Critics have started calling it “AI slop.”
“Before, an artist needed a lot of creative skill, but also artistic skill. Now, all you need is prompting skills,” said LSU assistant professor Nihar Sreepada, who researches AI in public relations, journalism, advertising and political communication.
Sreepada pointed to a recurring format of fantastical “creatures,” such as Meowl, a cat with an owl’s body, that have resurfaced because AI tools now make it easy to animate them into lifelike motion.
“People in the comments talk about it as though it’s a real animal, even though they know it’s not. They have developed this parasocial relationship, like an identification with the Meowl, and it has become a wild trend.”
The upside, he said, is access. People with creative ideas but limited drawing, animation or editing skills can now produce visual worlds quickly. The downside is what gets washed out when art becomes inhuman.
“The flip side of it is that the whole concept and essence of art is that it takes care,” Sreepada said. “It takes human creativity, human consciousness and human skill.”
Creators also have a financial incentive to post “AI slop.”
“AI is really superpowering spam,” 404 Media co-founder Jason Koebler told NPR in an August 2025 report about the rise of mass-produced AI videos.
“The whole point is to hit the algorithm in some way — to basically win the algorithmic lottery, get people to like, comment, share and, hopefully, go very viral,” Koebler said.
The report followed a 21-year-old college student in the Philippines who posts one or two AI-made clips a day and earned $9,000 in one month through YouTube’s AdSense program.
For working artists, this expectation to stay visible online can affect promotion plans and release schedules.
Braxton Couvillion, a New Orleans rapper who releases music independently, said the pace of AI content has changed what it takes to hold the attention of new fans.
“It’s hard to drop new music because so many times the song’s potential gets wasted without the right promotion,” Couvillion said. “That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t post. Posting is part of the job, even when nothing blows up.”
In an online write-up about “AI slop” channels, a Reddit user discovered estimates that some accounts could pull in millions per year by pumping out mass-produced videos.
Zbor said that is why “handmade” still matters, even if the algorithm does not always notice it right away: the work carries a consistent emotional logic that can’t be mass-produced, and the people who connect with it tend to stay.
