It was probably about a month ago when I first saw it, all thanks to my colleague Sweta. If she hadn’t told me it was AI right before I saw it, would I have believed that it was real? Did I have to believe it was real? I wonder.
What I’m talking about is the recently viral AI stadium trend in social media where individuals, using AI, intentionally find themselves edited onto a short cinematic ‘TikTok’ type edit. Here, they are in the spectator stands taking on a commercial air of importance as they seamlessly stand out amongst random people, in a random stadium, at a random sports match. Supposedly, the breathtaking ‘main character’. The trend, which included everything from IPL (Indian Premier League) to baseball, came out around the first week of May but by the end of June, the novelty had worn off.
Non-existent Jumbotron
The AI generated shot replicates the selective and focused live audience shots that are usually displayed in a giant video screen situated inside sports stadiums. This screen is the jumbotron. Often we don’t realise that the camera is on us and that the visual is being displayed in the jumbotron because we are too focused on the game. There have been many real-life moments where such an instance of a handsome guy or girl went viral on social media.
A real jumbotron fan shot during London Olympics 2012.
| Photo Credit:
Duncan Rawlinson/FLICKR
Maybe it’s the sports season air or the desire to be unpretentiously videoed but either way, AI understood the assignment and replicated the visual from just a photo with such specificity and high hyper-realistic quality that it does not look like your average AI slop video. Naturally, a large chunk of people immediately believed these were edits made from real broadcasted clips.
What is AI slop?
Social media swims in AI slop videos. These are uncanny, low-quality, video content that is generated by Artificial Intelligence solely for wanton consumption. What’s interesting about it is that though it’s relatively easy to spot them (not always) and they look unconvincing, these videos go viral.
A study revealed that more than 20% of the videos pushed by YouTube algorithm to its new users are AI slop videos.
Social media swims in AI slop videos.
| Photo Credit:
Wikimedia Commons
Meanwhile, a reverse wave of worry popped up where several content creators explained how not to fall for these AI videos thinking they are real.
Prompt Era
Once people figured that this was AI, it was a steady competition for making more. Some of the creators who made the video themselves, asked their viewers to reply ‘prompt’ for getting it. At the drop of a hat there were no actual comments under these videos, only a seemingly endless sea of single words — ‘prompt’.
ChatGPT and Gemini must have been receiving multiple dozens of images to be converted to videos. Once posted, these videos were getting views easily ranging from 4 million to 150 million.
Prompt Era.
| Photo Credit:
Getty Images
Such viral mass production and the “AI social media trend” is a continuation from the infamous Studio Ghibli art image generation using ChatGPT. Apparently, when the Ghibli trend got viral, ChatGPT usage hit a record with more than 150 million users for the first time. This is still 2025 we are talking about. The obsession is, culturally speaking, still new. Yet, AI seems to make the Ghibli trend feel so old. In this manner, I wonder what sort of gratification there actually is in any of it. Have you also wondered the same?
Will-o’-the-wisp
A single photo was changed into a video whose content was made from elements altered from existing real-life examples. The stadium trend had the real down to tiny details — scorecards, crowd reactions, exact lighting, the correct blurriness, zoom and so on. The excitement over the trend and how far generative AI had developed was the talk of the town. Soon enough, a discourse developed around it. One user blatantly expressed astonishment at the trend and the so-called main character energy it was signalling saying you “didn’t even actually go lmao”. Others came out with the AI formula of these videos — the slight wind, parted lips every few seconds, looks crafted based on existing stereotypical beauty principles, etc.
The illusion is not in AI as a technology. It’s in the usage of it. Historically we’ve had filters making us look funny, manual editing of pictures, etc. but all of those were very much an overlay on an existing, concrete picture or video where you’ve been somewhere. If you are an artist and you draw yourself in a stadium crowd, that is a direct, intimate rendering of your creativity and subjectivity without a third party involved. An AI copies. AI takes your picture and creates something totally different, a lie.
Once I saw Lionel Messi in a K-pop music broadcast, dancing. Clearly AI, right? What if it was someone else, someone who didn’t have Messi’s immunity which comes from his popularity? Highly likely, you would have believed unless you avidly keep up with K-pop and know for sure such an idol does not exist. For those unaware, this is misinformation. The truth is that it’s already happening. The more such content spreads, the more you have trust issues. If you’ve read the “Why our brain loves to lie” article about a week ago, you’ll know the psychology and its effects on society. Not to mention, every time something unique is out there, AI has the ability to make it into a general idea.
Ah, algorithm, just feel the rhythm
Ever since ‘algorithm’ became the buzz word, much research has been carried out in understanding it. Researchers have recognised that algorithms, always revised, work with information that gets people to actively participate in public. If we push much AI content into the digital space, which the algorithm feeds on, it takes it into the system, and distributes it back such that these AI videos are all we see and we fall into its rhythm. This is a loop trick.
Whether it’s Ghibli, making alternate AI endings for your favourite movies, or AI filter trends, you achieve far less with these edits compared to the shareholders of AI companies. When its usage and users skyrocket everywhere during a viral trend, you make them fabulously rich. We recently had Elon Musk, known for his heavy investments in AI, as the world’s first trillionaire.
Published – July 06, 2026 08:00 am IST
#sloppy #trend #Hindu
