Some people are making thousands of dollars a month writing stories that never happened. They’re not journalists, novelists, or screenwriters. They’re using AI to crank out fake melodramas on X, and the platform is paying them for every view. Making money with AI slop on X has quietly become one of the easiest, most controversial side hustles of 2026.
What is AI slop, exactly?
You’ve seen it. Probably more than you realize. Those threads on X where someone describes an absurd confrontation at work, a dramatic courtroom scene, a revenge story against a terrible boss. The posts read like movie scripts. Tension builds, villains get exposed, heroes walk away triumphant.
Here’s the thing: most of them are completely fake. Generated by AI. And the people posting them are getting paid real money through X’s creator monetization program.
WIRED’s Steven Levy recently dug deep into this phenomenon. He found an entire ecosystem of creators who’ve figured out that AI-generated drama is basically engagement gold. The stories hit emotional triggers that make people click, comment, and share without thinking twice. It’s emotional fast food, and people keep coming back for more.
If you’re already thinking this sounds like something that makes the internet a worse place, you’re not wrong. But that hasn’t stopped anyone.
How the X monetization program works
X pays creators based on engagement. The more people interact with your posts through replies, reposts, and likes, the more money you earn. It’s that simple.
The program became a goldmine for certain types of content. Outrage works. Drama works. Stories where the underdog wins against a cartoonishly evil antagonist? Those perform like nothing else.
And here’s where it gets interesting for anyone thinking about making money with AI slop on X. The platform doesn’t currently have effective guardrails against AI-generated stories presented as real experiences. X sued 8 Vietnamese creators back in May 2025 for fraudulently gaming the system, but the melodrama factories kept churning.
One creator WIRED spoke to goes by the handle BIGBEN. He claims to be a 21-year-old trader in Nigeria. When Levy asked about his process, BIGBEN was surprisingly honest. He gives Grok (xAI’s chatbot) a sentence or two of setup, and the AI writes the entire dramatic thread. Minutes of work, potentially thousands of views, real ad revenue.
The formula behind viral AI melodramas
A researcher at the University of Maryland who studies AI writing broke down the structure. It’s remarkably consistent:
- First, an innocent person gets wronged. Fired unfairly, evicted illegally, cheated on. The more relatable the injustice, the better.
- Then the villain escalates. They gloat, they threaten, they reveal their scheme.
- Finally, a dramatic reversal. Sealed documents, a surprise witness, an email chain that exposes everything.
- The hero wins. The villain gets destroyed.
Sound familiar? That’s because it’s the same emotional arc that’s powered storytelling for centuries. The difference is that AI can generate a new version in seconds, and social media platforms reward it with cash.
The formula works because it preys on three human instincts: the desire for fairness, the lust for retribution, and the satisfaction of seeing bad people get what they deserve. AI slop creators know this. They’re not trying to write literature. They’re optimizing for engagement, and engagement pays.
The tools behind these stories
You don’t need expensive software. You don’t need a team. The barrier to entry for making money with AI slop on X is remarkably low.
The most popular tool is Grok, which is integrated directly into X. Because it’s built into the platform, creators can generate content without even leaving the app. They type a prompt, get a dramatic story, copy it into a thread, and post. Some use ChatGPT or Claude as alternatives, but Grok’s native integration makes it the tool of choice for X-native creators.
The prompts are minimal. According to BIGBEN, a sentence or two is enough. Something like: “Write a story about a woman who discovers her husband has been secretly stealing from her mother’s estate.” The AI handles the rest: the dialogue, the pacing, the dramatic twists, the satisfying conclusion.
This is worth pausing on. The same technology that people use to write blog posts, draft emails, and summarize documents is being weaponized to flood social media with fake stories. And unlike other forms of AI misuse, this one comes with a direct financial incentive.
How much money are they actually making?
This is where it gets murky. Nobody’s publishing their tax returns.
WIRED noted that these stories routinely garner hundreds of thousands of views, sometimes millions. Some of that traffic is suspected to be bot-driven, which inflates the numbers. But even accounting for bots, the engagement is real enough to generate meaningful ad revenue.
For context, X’s creator payouts have been inconsistent. Some creators report earning pennies despite viral posts. Others claim thousands per month. The variability depends on factors like audience demographics, geographic location, and how much of the engagement is organic.
BIGBEN didn’t share specific numbers. But the fact that he continues doing it, day after day, suggests it’s worth his time. For a 21-year-old in Nigeria, even a few hundred dollars a month from AI-generated stories would be significant income.
The ethics of AI slop monetization
Let’s be real for a second. This is not a feel-good side hustle story.
These creators are presenting fiction as fact. They’re writing fake first-person narratives that exploit people’s emotions for money. Someone reads a heartbreaking story about workplace injustice, gets angry on behalf of a person who doesn’t exist, and the creator collects ad revenue from their emotional response.
There’s a broader impact too. Every fake story that goes viral makes the platform worse. It crowds out real voices, real experiences, real journalism. It trains the algorithm to prioritize manufactured outrage over genuine content. And it erodes trust in everything on the platform, because readers start assuming every story might be fake.
That said, the AI slop economy doesn’t exist in a moral vacuum. X created this incentive structure. The platform decided to pay for engagement without building effective systems to distinguish real from fake content. Creators are simply responding to the incentives the platform created.
If you’re considering making money with AI slop on X as a side hustle, understand what you’d be signing up for. It’s technically easy. It might even be profitable. But you’d be contributing to a problem that’s making social media measurably worse for everyone.
What this means for regular AI users
Here’s the thing that should matter to you, assuming you’re not planning to become an AI slop factory.
The same tools powering this content explosion are available to everyone. The question isn’t whether AI can generate engaging stories. It obviously can. The question is what you choose to do with that capability.
If you want to make money with AI, there are better paths. Genuine AI-powered side hustles that create real value for real people. Content automation that helps rather than exploits. Tools that save time rather than waste it.
The AI slop economy on X is a cautionary tale about what happens when powerful technology meets misaligned incentives. It’s easy money for some, but it comes at a cost to the entire information ecosystem. And as detection tools improve and platforms eventually respond, the window for making money with AI slop on X will close.
Meanwhile, the creators building something real with AI will still be standing. If you’re going to use AI to make money, make something worth making. The melodramas will fade. Real value compounds.
