How to Get Rich Off AI Slop: The $37,000/Month Guide to Making the World's Stupidest Videos

Imagine if you could print money. Not metaphorically — literally, if your printer produced low-effort AI-generated videos of a mustachioed drum character named Tung Tung Tung Sahur having a domestic dispute with a cat. That’s not a joke premise. According to a landmark New York Times investigation published June 1, that’s exactly how people like Norbert Barszczewski are making real money.

Barszczewski is a 30-something Polish content hustler who, in the spring of 2025, saw a YouTube video promising you could make money online by creating AI-generated ads. No experience required. Just make weird videos, post them daily, and collect $2 per thousand views. He signed up. He spent half a year grinding. And then, in March 2026, he posted a screenshot: $37,281.94 in one month, generated by posting 296 AI videos in 30 days.

This is the AI slop economy. And it’s real, it’s bizarre, and it’s changing what “content creation” actually means.

What Is AI Slop, Anyway?

AI slop is the internet’s colloquial term for low-quality, high-volume media churned out by generative AI with minimal human effort. The word traces back to pig feed — scraps, refuse, whatever you throw in. That’s exactly what these platforms want: volume over quality, quantity over craft.

On TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, slop takes the form of surreal AI-generated videos featuring absurd characters. The poster child is Tung Tung Tung Sahur — an Indonesian traditional drum personified as a dramatic soap-opera actor. He’s been cast as a jealous boyfriend, a struggling parent, a confused tourist, and apparently a thousand other roles that no human screenwriter would ever pitch.

But here’s the twist: the slop isn’t just mindless garbage. It’s a calculated response to algorithmic incentives. As the NYT reported, successful slop creators studied viral patterns and discovered that the most engaging AI content doesn’t try to look human-made — it embraces its own absurdity. The weirder, the better.

The Business Model: Attention Is the New Oil

Behind the slop is a platform called Affiliate Network, run by 35-year-old Roman Khaves, who built his career transitioning from influencer marketing to algorithmic content farming. Affiliate Network connects businesses with creators who make ads — but these aren’t your typical sponsored posts. These are AI-generated videos that blend seamlessly into social feeds, often indistinguishable from the slop they’re advertising.

The economics are simple: platforms like TikTok and Instagram use recommendation algorithms that don’t care who made your video — they care what keeps people watching. A weird AI cat soap opera gets more views than a well-scripted documentary. The algorithm rewards engagement, not quality. So creators feed the algorithm exactly what it wants: constant, bizarre, low-friction content.

Barszczewski bought multiple phones to manage dozens of accounts simultaneously. A 21-year-old Brazilian creator named Pedro Camargo quit his day job after Affiliate Network showed him how to mass-produce “Texting Stories” — fabricated text conversations overlaid on Minecraft gameplay, with a product plug at the end.

Why Does This Exist?

The answer is both hilarious and depressing. On one level, slop exists because there’s an audience for it. People watch these videos. Millions of them. The “Tung Tung Tung Sahur girlfriend” video alone has racked up 1.7 million views. Not because it’s good — because it’s so gloriously dumb that you can’t look away.

On another level, slop exists because the barrier to entry for content creation has collapsed to zero. You don’t need a camera crew, a script, or even basic writing skills. You need an AI video generator and the willingness to post 10 videos a day for six months.

This creates an uncomfortable mirror for the rest of the content industry. If you’ve ever written a listicle about the “top 10 ergonomic chairs” (which turns out to be written by the chair company’s marketing team), you’re doing the same thing — just with slightly more effort.

What This Means for Everyone Else

If you’re a legitimate content creator, the slop economy is a threat. It floods discovery feeds with low-effort competition for attention. If you’re a business owner, it’s a warning: your customers are being sold to by algorithmic ad factories that cost pennies per impression. And if you’re just a human being trying to use the internet? You’re living in the golden age of digital absurdity.

The NYT investigation concludes with a sobering note: most slop creators make very little. Barszczewski’s $37,000/month is the exception, not the rule. The real winners are the platform owners and the ad networks that profit from the attention flood.

But here’s the thing: the slop economy proves something important. It proves that creativity in the age of AI isn’t about producing beautiful art — it’s about understanding systems. Barszczewski didn’t win by being a good artist. He won by being a good systems hacker who understood that the algorithm rewards absurdity.

That’s the real story. The rest is just Tung Tung Tung Sahur being weird.

Quiz: How Well Do You Understand the Slop Economy?

Q1: How much did Norbert Barszczewski earn in March 2026 from AI slop content? A: $37,281.94 (from 296 videos posted that month)

Q2: What pricing model do platforms like Affiliate Network typically offer slop creators? A: About $2 per thousand views

Q3: According to the NYT, what do the most successful slop creators NOT do? A: They don’t try to make their content look human-made. The most viral slop leans into its own absurdity.

Sources

• The New York Times — Can Content Creators Get Rich Off A.I. Slop Like Tung Tung Tung Sahur? — June 1, 2026
• Medium/The Generator — Why Do We Love AI Slop? “Italian Brainrot” and Cat Soap Operas — November 18, 2025
• BBC News — AI ‘Slop’ Is Transforming Social Media — and There’s a Backlash — February 4, 2026