Dispatches from the Slop Economy: Field Notes on 63 Billion Views of Nothing

Dispatch 1: The Number That Should Haunt You

Sixty-three billion.

That is how many views AI slop has accumulated on YouTube, according to a study published this month. Sixty-three billion views of content that nobody remembers watching. Content generated by machines, uploaded by operators, consumed by algorithms pretending to be audiences, and audiences pretending to pay attention.

Sixty-three billion is larger than the GDP of most countries. It is a staggering monument to volume. And it tells you everything about where the content industry stands in February 2026.

We have built an engine so efficient at producing forgettable things that we can now measure its output in units previously reserved for national economies.

Dispatch 2: The Ad Inside the Oracle

OpenAI started running ads inside ChatGPT this month. Sit with that sentence for a moment.

The tool that millions of marketers use to generate content now contains advertising. The oracle has a sponsor. The thing writing your brand's blog posts is simultaneously selling you someone else's product.

This changes the relationship between AI tools and the people who use them in ways the industry has barely begun to process. When a CMO asks ChatGPT for content strategy advice, will the response steer toward an advertiser's platform? When a creative director asks for script feedback, will the notes arrive pre-seasoned with sponsored suggestions?

The trust contract between AI and its users just acquired fine print. Read it carefully.

Dispatch 3: The Gesture Gap

HeyGen's Avatar IV can now generate hand gestures. This sounds like a minor feature update. It is actually a seismic shift in synthetic video production.

Before Avatar IV, AI avatars existed from the neck up. They spoke. They emoted facially. They maintained eye contact. But their bodies remained oddly still, arms locked at their sides or cropped out of frame entirely. Every experienced viewer could feel it. Something was missing. The uncanny valley lived in the stillness below the chin.

Hands change everything. A speaker who gestures is a speaker who thinks. A presenter who moves their hands while explaining a concept triggers mirror neurons in the viewer. Engagement increases. Retention increases. Trust increases. All because the avatar finally learned to talk with its hands.

At Talentless AI, we noticed this immediately. As a HeyGen Gold Partner, we've been testing Avatar IV since early access, and the difference in audience response is measurable. Watch time on avatar videos with natural gestures runs 23% longer in our internal testing. The comments section shifts too. Fewer people mention that something feels "off." More people engage with the actual content.

This is what progress looks like in synthetic media. Incremental, specific, grounded in the biomechanics of human communication.

Dispatch 4: The Market Gets Its Price Tag

The synthetic media market passed $7.29 billion in 2025. Analysts project $48.55 billion by 2033. A growth rate of 26.75% annually, compounding.

These numbers attract two kinds of people. The first kind sees opportunity. The second kind sees a gold rush. The difference between them determines the quality of everything you will watch for the next decade.

Gold rushes produce ghost towns. They produce abandoned claims and poisoned rivers and fortunes built on extraction. They also produce San Francisco. The outcome depends entirely on who stays after the easy money dries up.

The synthetic media market is in its Sutter's Mill phase. Everyone has arrived. The tools are cheap. The barriers are low. And the landscape is already littered with abandoned content channels, defunct AI video startups, and brands nursing reputational wounds from campaigns that should have stayed in the draft folder.

At Talentless AI, we build for the San Francisco outcome. Our studio model, part creative production house, part AI superconsultancy, part experimental lab, exists because we believe the market will reward companies that treat synthetic media as a craft discipline. We work with partners like LuciHub on production infrastructure, Phyusion on strategic communications, and Propolis to bring this thinking directly to B2B marketing leaders at brands like Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce.

The people in our orbit are asking the right question. They are asking how to use AI to make content that earns attention. Earning attention is harder than generating content by several orders of magnitude.

Dispatch 5: The 83% Problem

Eighty-three percent of consumers say they have watched a video they suspected was AI-generated. The top giveaways: robotic gestures (67%), unnatural voices (55%), lack of emotional tone (51%).

Read that list again. Robotic gestures. Unnatural voices. Missing emotional tone. These are all craft failures. Every single one of them is fixable by a director who knows what they are doing.

Robotic gestures: solved by Avatar IV's new motion system, combined with a producer who understands which gestures match which content beats.

Unnatural voices: solved by HeyGen's Voice Director feature, which lets you control pace, emphasis, and emotional register at the sentence level. But only if the person using it actually understands vocal performance.

Missing emotional tone: solved by writing better scripts. By understanding that a synthetic avatar reading flat copy will produce flat video, exactly the same way a human actor reading flat copy produces flat video.

The technology is already past these problems. The operators have yet to catch up. This gap between tool capability and operator skill is the defining tension of synthetic media in 2026.

Dispatch 6: Decart's Window Into Tomorrow

A company called Decart just released Lucy 2, a model that edits live video in real time using natural language. You speak to it. It changes the stream. Sub-second latency.

This is a window into a future where content creation collapses into content direction. Where the production timeline shrinks from days to seconds. Where a single creative director sits in a virtual control room and orchestrates synthetic media the way a conductor leads an orchestra: in real time, by feel, through instinct developed over years.

That future rewards the same people the present rewards. Directors. Writers. Producers. People with taste.

Lucy 2 is faster than anything else on the market. It processes incoming video instantaneously. But speed without skill produces slop at the speed of light.

Dispatch 7: What the Field Looks Like From Here

These are the coordinates of the synthetic media landscape as of February 27, 2026:

The market is enormous and growing at 26% annually. The technology has reached a level of sophistication where the average viewer can be genuinely uncertain whether they are watching a human or an avatar. The major platforms have implemented or are implementing disclosure requirements. Regulators in India and China have moved first. The West will follow.

And yet. Sixty-three billion views of slop. Eighty-three percent of consumers spotting fakes. Thirty-six percent saying AI content lowers their perception of a brand.

The technology is extraordinary. The median use of the technology is embarrassing. And the companies positioned between those two realities, the ones who can bridge the gap between what AI can do and what most people are doing with it, will define the next era of content.

That is what we do at Talentless AI. We sit in the gap. We operate with the conviction that synthetic media production is a discipline, with principles, standards, and a body of knowledge that separates professional work from amateur experimentation. We make content that people want to watch twice. That has always been the job. AI just changed the instrument. It did not change the standard.

These are field notes from a strange and accelerating moment. The slop economy is real. The craft economy is forming inside it. And the question every brand must answer is brutally simple.

Which economy do you want to fund?

Steve Mudd is the CEO of Talentless AI, an AI superconsultancy and creative studio. HeyGen Gold Partner. Working with brands, studios, and marketing leaders to produce synthetic-first content that earns attention. We make content people want to watch twice.