It's Not Ritual, Mike — It's a Content Farm

I wondered about the phenomenon of AI-produced videos that Mike Pitts has highlighted, the unasked question of why. Incentives matter. So it seemed appropriate to ask an AI the question.

Follow the money (such as it is)

These are content farms. Pitts himself identifies one Instagram account as based in the Philippines — not incidentally, one of the major hubs for AI content farming alongside India and parts of West Africa. A Kapwing study from late 2025 identified 278 YouTube channels producing nothing but AI slop: collectively 63 billion views, an estimated $117 million in annual ad revenue. The top channels pull $4 million a year.

The channels Pitts found aren't in that league — low views, low subscribers. But the marginal cost of each video is close to zero. Stitch together AI clips, overlay a synthetic voiceover, bolt on SEO tags ("Stonehenge mystery," "how was Stonehenge built"), and you have a lottery ticket that costs nothing to print. YouTube CPM for history content aimed at US/UK viewers runs $5–12 per thousand impressions. A few hundred views multiplied across dozens of daily uploads across disposable channels adds up — not to a fortune in London, but to real money in Manila or Lagos. As the Manila Bulletin noted, the strategy is simple: flood the platform, earn from volume.

That's why the channel names — BRIGHT SIDE, The Strange Vault, Chewy Playz, PyramidCoin — are disposable nonsense. They're fishing nets, not brands. The four Easter Island videos posted on a single day aren't an algorithm responding to Pitts' curiosity. They're a production line scaling up on a trending topic cluster.

Is the apocalypse nigh?

Pitts' concluding vision — AI cannibalising itself until original research vanishes — deserves pushback. The Stonehenge video has about 500 views. YouTube's own algorithm now penalises low-effort AI content with up to a five-fold reach reduction, and CEO Neal Mohan used the phrase "AI slop" in his January 2026 letter, pledging enforcement. The platform has already terminated or wiped at least 17 channels.

The real loss is narrower: the middle ground once occupied by decent popular television, where a casually curious viewer might have stumbled on something approximately true. That's worth worrying about. But the web has been through content-farm infestations before — Google's Panda update crushed the keyword-stuffing epidemic of 2009–2011. The cycle of exploitation and platform response doesn't end in civilisational collapse. It ends in better filtering, with damage done in the interim.

What can be done?

For individuals: source literacy. Check the channel, the subscriber count, the production style. If the voiceover sounds like a machine reading a script written by a machine summarising Wikipedia, trust your instincts.

For platforms: enforce the existing rules. Mandatory AI-content labelling under YouTube's 2026 transparency policy is a start, but only if permanent demonetisation for non-disclosure is applied at scale. Provenance standards like C2PA need wider adoption. Raising monetisation thresholds for new channels would make the throwaway-channel model less viable.

For creators: keep making the real thing. Structured metadata, transcripts, institutional collaboration, and presence on platforms that reward quality over volume all help. So does writing sharp blog posts pointing out that Neolithic Wiltshire did not, in fact, have windfarms.

Pitts is right that there's a problem. But it's not a metaphysical crisis. It's low-grade commercial fraud enabled by cheap tools and a platform that hasn't caught up with enforcement.