“The Shrimp Jesus situation isn’t just crazy, it’s scandalous,” produced ChatGPT.
Photo by Dylan Schmidt
A record number of rumor mills have closed down operations nationwide, leaving thousands of celebrity gossip researchers and creators without employment. The genre, known for its “noninvasive” paparazzi pictures and “amateur armchair” psychology, was once home to non-artificial content creators who occupied waiting time during traffic, on the toilet, and on late nights.
The main culprit of the rumor mills’ closure has been identified as a new form of artificial intelligence — Super Liminal Occurrence Presentations (SLOP) — which has flooded the content market, replacing human creators and vloggers with short-form videos of “faux friends”, according to one source.
Popular gossip influencer and true crime connoisseur Braeyleigh Smith, known as “BraeykingNews” on Instagram and TikTok, shared, “One day, I’m doing my makeup and talking about this killing spree in the ’90s, y’know? I even went with a pastel tone to match the living room of the first victim! I noticed a surprising lack of engagement and found that all of my followers were just watching AI videos of cats and Shrimp Jesus — sorry, I mean, Christacean. I just have to ask, where’s the humanity? Where’s the care and thought? I’ll tell you: It’s not with Our Lord and Shrimp Shravior [sic].”
The shutdown also affected celebrity photographers who rely on attention generated from clickbait. “Normally, we get millions of views on our articles and our magazines get sent to all the hotspots: dentist’s offices, hair salons, the back alley behind the White House,” lamented one paparazzo. “But now, we’re struggling to get any of our target demographics — they’re all sharing videos of Christacean healing RFK Jr.’s brain worm. I understand we weren’t making art, but we still had a loyal base…or so we thought.”
Former rumor mills are already being turned into AI data centers. Warehouses normally used for storing exclusive, surreptitious photos of celebrities in the wild, as well as creating exaggerated narratives and diet fads are now filled with servers pumping out SLOP at record speeds. Human creators, freelance or otherwise, have realized they can’t keep up.
Algrrrhythm, an anonymous BlueSky influencer dubbing themselves a “fifth-party news outlet” and budding Soundcloud rapper, discussed the loss of their abandoned office in one of the many former Salt Lake City rumor mills. “I’m actually kind of happy I can stop talking about the problematic things Chappell Roan has done. Now I can focus on my music career!” Algrrrhythm then shared a USB flash drive full of their tracks and a computer virus capable of accessing credit card information.
Due to the rise in SLOP, many genres of online content such as true crime, funny cats, and fake news have been deemed unprofitable for a human to make full-time. Internet users are now exposed to an instantly created and algorithmically-sourced plate of Christacean SLOP content that has “never seen the touch of human hands.” Ultimately, according to SLOP experts, “the effects SLOP will have on the online gossip industry at large and this ‘new wave of SLOP-’o’tainment’” is immeasurable, as it continues to dominate human-made gossip.
