September 15, 2025 - 2:00pm
Charlie Kirk was assassinated on Wednesday in Utah, and even before the ink on the traditional news obituaries dried, Amazon was already filling up with AI-generated books in memoriam. The Kindle store carried titles that promised to give readers “the full story” of his death and “the quick arrest of the Charlie Kirk shooter”, though the suspect hadn’t been identified at that point, much less caught.
One particular $7.99 e-book raised eyebrows: The Shooting of Charlie Kirk: A Comprehensive Account of the Utah Valley University Attack, the Aftermath, and America’s Response. Social media users noted that the author — a phantom named Anastasia J. Casey — had apparently published the book before the event took place. By Thursday evening, Amazon removed the books and calmed nerves by clarifying that The Shooting of Charlie Kirk was actually published on 10 September, following the shooting.
The speed with which Kirk’s death was monetised is jarring, but it is hardly an anomaly. It is a glimpse of a cultural ecosystem which generative AI has quietly colonised. The fact that a major marketplace could be flooded with instant hagiographies, written by no one, about an event that hadn’t fully concluded, is a stark reminder that the AI slop machine doesn’t sleep: it digests the news cycle in real time and spits it back out as a product for consumption.
Publishing is the canary in the coal mine. Over the last year or two, Amazon’s Kindle store has been inundated with AI-written novels — so many that the Authors Guild and the Romance Writers of America have raised alarms about “spam farmers”. The YA-friendly “romantasy” genre, one of publishing’s few growth sectors, has been targeted with slapdash ChatGPT concoctions that mimic bestselling series.
In January, a prolific romance author writing under the pseudonym K.C. Crowne published a Russian mafia-romance novel called Dark Obsession. Soon, screenshots began circulating showing what appeared to be a raw AI prompt embedded in the middle of the book: “Certainly! Here’s an enhanced version of your passage, making Elena more relatable and injecting additional humor while providing a brief, sexy description of Grigori.” A ChatGPT help ticket found in the text of a bodice-ripper was a smoking gun that reveals just how seamlessly AI junk is creeping into the mainstream.
Music has fared no better. On Spotify, a fake AI band named Velvet Sundown racked up over a million plays before it was discovered that their music, promo photos, and backstory were all computer-generated. Most listeners may never even know they are nodding along to a ghost band. Streaming-farm economics incentivise slop: churn out endless ambient tracks with fake artist names, collect fractions of pennies, and repeat.
Film is next. OpenAI this week unveiled its first animated feature, Critterz, to be released in 2026, an experiment in letting a text-to-video model churn out entire cinematic sequences for a massive discount. Hollywood’s striking writers were right to be nervous: if a studio can type “Pixar-style movie about a talking kangaroo who learns about climate change” and get back 90 minutes of content, why pay a screenwriter? The Writers Guild extracted some contractual protections, but the industry logic points in only one direction toward cheap synthetic content.
Even journalism has been compromised. News outlets from CNET to Sports Illustrated have published AI-generated stories without clear disclosure, often riddled with errors. In February, I posted a short video of an anti-Trump No Kings protest at the Pennsylvania Capitol building, and an AI-powered news service called Storyful quickly turned it into a news story picked up as far away as Australia.
The dystopian future taking shape is not one where robots replace all artists outright, but where genuine human work becomes a boutique niche, like vinyl records in the age of Spotify. A hand-crafted novel, a carefully reported investigation, or a band sweating on stage will still exist, but they will be treated as artisanal luxuries, consumed by connoisseurs. For everyone else, there will be the slop: AI-written Charlie Kirk biographies, Spotify filler, Netflix-style auto-cartoons, and news stories composed by bots.
In fairness, culture has always had its pulp, its hacks, and its kitsch. And even before the advent of generative AI, the last generation has witnessed a flattening of cultural life: art and entertainment have been dumbed down by algorithmic incentives, corporate risk aversion, and a cultural climate that prizes literalism over nuance. Performative politics has given us products designed to be ideologically legible rather than genuinely challenging, while declining media literacy has left younger audiences ill-equipped to handle ambiguity or satire. The “slopification” was already underway; AI simply turns up the speed and scale. What was once a slow drift toward homogenised, shallow, disposable content is now a flood.
If Kirk’s instant posthumous canon is any indication, that future isn’t arriving tomorrow. It’s already here.
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