If you make content for the internet in 2026 and you use AI to make it, the internet has a word for what you produce, and the word is “slop.” The slop comments pile up under your posts. Influencers get skewered for attending a brand trip hosted by OpenAI. Hank Green, a YouTuber of long standing, issues a dramatic public apology for what he called “relying too heavily on AI.” From the outside, you might reasonably picture the AI-creator community as a group of people huddled in a defensive crouch, waiting for the storm to pass.
Business Insider’s Kelsey Vlamis went to find them, and found them doing the opposite of crouching. On Tuesday, the trade publication TheWrap and media brand What’s Trending hosted “AI Creator Day” at UCLA, a one-day conference that drew hundreds of creators, marketers, brands and AI enthusiasts to talks titled things like “What It Actually Takes to Make an AI Series” and “Who Decides What’s Human?” Vlamis went in expecting strategy sessions on handling the backlash. Instead, she reports, she found hype, practical AI filmmaking tips and almost no apologies.
“We’re taking it in the head right now,” said DeStorm Power, who has over 3 million YouTube subscribers, speaking on a panel about how OG YouTubers are using the technology. His approach, though, is not to apologize: he said he ignores the “slop” comments and focuses instead on the thousands of people who enjoy the AI-generated content he makes.
And honestly, the arithmetic there deserves to be taken seriously. An audience is not a jury delivering a single verdict; it is a distribution. On one tail sit the people angry enough to type. In the middle sit thousands of viewers quietly watching. Creators are paid by the middle, and platforms meter the middle — and from the platform’s point of view, the person yelling “slop” in the comments is also engagement. The economics already favor working with AI: AI companies are paying influencers seven-figure fees to sell their tools, which rather raises the stakes on the audience’s side of the ledger.
The twenty-year merman
Several attendees told Vlamis they came partly because the event functioned as a “safe space,” and the overarching mood was excitement about what AI lets them do. The works screened were presented with pride: a black-and-white, old-Hollywood-style short; a sci-fi action thriller series called The Arc, whose makers said they completed the entire first episode, from ideation to final cut, in three and a half weeks; and a comedy sketch about having a merman for a roommate.
That last one is Living with a Merman, from YouTuber Chris Capel, who said the idea was 20 years old but he never had the resources to make it happen — until now. That is the actual economic pitch for AI video, and it is more interesting than the culture war. Imagine — purely as a hypothetical — that you have spent two decades wanting to film a sketch about a merman roommate. The joke was always there. The merman budget was not. The tool did not write the joke; it collapsed the budget. You can think the result is slop and still notice that this is a real change in who gets to make things.
There is a caveat, and Vlamis flagged it: it wasn’t always clear how much of each work AI had actually generated — were the ideas, jokes and dialogue generated, or was it a human-written script with AI supplying the visuals? The creators, for their part, repeated one message like a refrain: a human made this, and AI was the tool. The tools name-checked at the conference included Seedance and Kling for video, Midjourney and Nano Banana Pro for images, and ChatGPT and Claude for ideation and writing.
David Bianchi, an actor, producer and director with credits on traditional film and TV productions, said he wanted to dispel the notion that AI cinema is easy. “It does take serious craft,” he said. “You have the tools, but you can’t make taste.” Translated out of panel-speak: the drill is now free, so the only thing left to sell is knowing where to put the hole. Though Vlamis noted that even the polished, photorealistic productions on show had a bit of that uncanny valley effect at times.
Who decides what’s human
The tougher questions got some airtime, if not much. During the panel called “Who Decides What’s Human?,” James Douglas, a vice president at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, said consumers should not be misled about what is and isn’t AI: “The person who is consuming the content should not be deceived.” There was less discussion of other standard worries — how to keep AI work from being too derivative, and whether the new opportunities outweigh the human jobs lost when productions can be made with far fewer people.
Vincent Marcus, a creator with more than 1.3 million Instagram followers, has already answered the jobs question for himself, in the negative. A voice actor, he said he expects that work to disappear: “I’m already preparing for my job to not exist.” For him, that is precisely the argument for embracing AI now rather than later.
Which was the day’s big theme: the wave is inevitable, and creators who don’t ride it get left behind. “The game is changing,” said Bernie Su, a web series creator and head of creative for the AI entertainment company Pickford. “We’ll do our thing. Audiences will react to us, and we’ll see what happens.”
It is a funny sentence, that last one. The audiences are already reacting — that is how the word “slop” got its workout. The conference’s bet is that the reacting matters less than the watching, and that by the time the question is settled, calling something AI-made will be about as meaningful as calling something digitally edited. We’ll see what happens.