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The fatalism was palpable in late 2024 when OpenAI announced the arrival of Sora, a Tiktok-style app that promised to feed users an endless stream of AI-generated content. Tech commentator Taylor Lorenz described it as the “slop-pocalypse”; the flattening of culture to a new low from which our pickled brains may never recover. The wider social landscape wasn’t in much better shape. Anecdotally at least, certain other platforms had become noticeably bloated with lowest-common-denomenator AI slop, suppressing posts from users’ friends and people they’d chosen to follow.
And as we’ve mentioned numerous times before, researchers from the CEU Democracy Institute estimated that 20% of all social media chatter comes from AI bots, sometimes doubling around important events like elections.
But here’s the thing: the future of culture is not as tightly bound to addictive social media platforms as it may seem. Although they continue to dominate the discourse, there’s a digital world beyond their reach where new communities are emerging and creativity thriving. It’s in these fringe spaces that we can see the opportunity for a more positive future beginning to take shape, specifically the emergence of three key elements and their combined impact on culture. Here’s how it all comes together.
AI makes video production more accessible.
Originating on Reddit in 2023, ‘Will Smith eating spaghetti’ has become the internet’s informal benchmark in assessing AI’s video generating capabilities. A modern day Turing test. The task is simple: can it create a believable depiction of a recognisable person doing something very ordinary? Initially, the answer was a resounding no. Early efforts were more likely to make viewers laugh than worry about robot domination, as a misshapen Fresh Prince shovelled clumps of yellow goo towards a bizarrely overexcited face. The robots clearly had very little understanding of what ‘real life’ was supposed to look like.
The most recent examples however, only three years on, are strikingly realistic, and undoubtedly convincing to a casual viewer. In the most widely shared version made with Google’s VO3, AI ‘Will’ happily slurps and chews away on his sauce-laden spaghetti while seemingly deep in thought, the ‘crunching’ noises providing the only degree of separation from reality, reminding us that the entity behind the clip doesn’t yet know what spaghetti would actually sound like when eaten (although you can bet it does now). And then there were the ‘fake’ trampolining rabbits that caught TikTok off-guard last summer, also created with Google’s VO3 AI video generator.
The tools have caught up, passed the spaghetti test, and opened the door to a new world of creative possibility. Now the public are beginning to take notice. In 2025, global downloads of AI-powered video editing apps more than doubled to 12m.
The consequences of this tech ending up in malicious hands, in a still largely unregulated internet, is obviously concerning as the rise of deepfakes attests. What’s discussed less often however is their potential in the right hands. Scaling this up from spaghetti and bunny rabbits, the potential for a new wave of storytelling to emerge from areas of society that have traditionally struggled to access the tools, resources or networks needed to make films, is exciting. Gen Alpha’s brightest will be able to build fantastical worlds with depth and characters at very little cost, with room to experiment, while the tools themselves enable aesthetics to emerge that weren’t previously possible. If you thought Skibidi Toilet was weird…
Before we get ahead of ourselves, some of the barriers to filmmaking will still persist even with affordable tools. We were told the internet would be the great democratiser of ideas, but inequality within the creative industries has widened to deeply concerning levels in the last decade, with only 16% of full time UK creative professionals coming from a Working Class background. The old gatekeepers just got replaced by new ones who arguably have even less regard for integrity. That’s where we come to…
New distribution channels open up.
Gen Alpha will inherit an entertainment landscape built for algorithms over people. The major streamers, once disruptive forces supporting boundary-pushing prestige TV, increasingly make creative decisions based on social media metrics, treating YouTube and TikTok as a talent pool, while Hollywood remains paralysed by risk aversion. The result favours attention-grabbing personalities who come with a built-in social following, like Mr Beast, over traditional storytelling formats. Commissions for scripted TV from major streamers fell by 24% in the first half of 2025, even as content spending increased overall.
But while the big studios tangle awkwardly with the creator economy, video apps specialising in short-form scripted melodramas have rocketed in popularity in the US over the last year.
Originating in China, platforms like ReelShort and DramaBox pulled in an estimated $3bn in revenue globally in 2025, tripling 2024’s figure. The movies on these apps are shot vertically and serialised into roughly 90 clips (viewed similarly to an Instagram story), requiring viewers to pay to unlock every ‘episode’ of a full length feature. Make no mistake, these are low-budget Hallmark-esque efforts that unashamedly lean into pastiche, often through themes of lust or revenge. Popular titles include ‘Claimed by my Ex’s Alpha Brother’, ‘I Had a Baby Without You’ and ‘Daddy Help, Mommy’s in Prison’. But while their content may lack a certain depth, these apps demonstrate that a pay-to-watch model, based on traditional scripted storytelling, can work on mobile, which until now has eluded even the biggest studios. ReelShort consistently features in the top 10 entertainment app downloads in the US, above the likes of Peacock and HBO, and actors suffering from the Hollywood and TV drought are finding regular work through their productions. While Hollywood is said to be keeping a close eye on the format, its previous experiments in vertical have fallen flat due to incompatibility with current business models, according to Business Insider.
If the success of ReelShort is a sign that a PPV-on-mobile is a realistic model for Western markets, it will invigorate a new generation of writers, actors and filmmakers with a genuine alternative to the current algorithm-obsessed, social-to-studio pipeline. They may host soapy melodrama today, but the infrastructure could support all types of video content tomorrow, from comedy to journalism, offering mass reach without the responsibility to build your own audience first.
There is a drawback however: ReelShort operates like a mini-studio, producing content in-house rather than hosting UGC. And a portion of their revenue comes from advertising. So technically, they’re still a gatekeeper of sorts, even if they offer an alternative to the establishment. Tomorrow’s creators would still need to convince an exec, who’ll be thinking in terms of viewership and advertisers, of an idea in order to have it realised. This brings us to…
D2C creator platforms mature.
Something is worth what people are willing to pay for it. So goes the first rule of market economics. For years creatives have found themselves on the raw side of this deal, the value of their work decided by large corporations who showed little interest in the economic sustainability of the arts. But an alternative model is gaining traction, proving that audiences are willing to pay into a fairer system that funds creatives directly for their work.
Substack has allowed a new generation of writers to flourish through its D2C subscription model, only a few years after the great pivot-to-video and de-monetisation of digital publishing rang the final bell for writing on the internet. Cultural Attention going to articles mentioning Substack increased 360% in 2025.
And even in the Spotify-era where all the music in the world is available for the price of a pizza, D2C platform Bandcamp reported that its fanbase was growing at an estimated 100,000 people per month in May 2024, generating $194m in revenue in the previous year, at least 82% of which went directly to the artist or label.
The main difference between these UGC platforms and those that offer creators a share of ad revenue is the kind of work that they reward. The former encourages creators to chase virality, drawing millions of engagements, keeping users on the platform and ultimately pushing up ad prices. The flipside to that is the audience’s needs become secondary to the algorithm, resulting in a media landscape of cynically optimised, attention-hungry sludge. On a D2C platform however, a creator’s livelihood depends on the quality of their work. They don’t need to reach millions of views with clickbait headlines or feed the algorithm new content every week to earn a living. They just need to offer enough value for a core audience to pay a small fee.
This pivot from mass attention-grabbing to niche community building opens the door to everything from a revival of local community-led journalism to a new wave of AI-supported surrealist horror or subversive comedy. The more lucrative and accessible this ecosystem can become, the higher the chance of innovation and engagement, placing filmmaking at the heart of a genuine counterculture where creativity, distribution and economic sustainability are more accessible than ever.
The convergence of these three burgeoning areas: AI video tools, vertical video platforms and D2C creator models, provide the tools, the space and the funding needed for boundary-pushing creativity to scale. Human storytelling will have the power to connect global audiences, express our deepest emotions and hold power to account, without having to first satisfy the needs of algorithms or advertisers. Rather than facing a descent into the slop-pocalypse, we could be on the precipice of a uniquely fertile creative period in human history. It’ll be up to Gen Alpha to light the spark.
Open AI’s Sora ceased operations in Spring 2026.
To unlock more insights, email discover@culturelab.co
Sources:
Appfigures Rise of AI Apps Report, 2025
How YouTubers and mini-dramas are unleashing a new wave of opportunity in Hollywood – Business Insider, 2025
As AI Takes Over Social Media, Are Dog Podcasters The Future?, Bloomberg 2025
Open AI Launches Video Generator App to Rival TikTok and YouTube, Wall Street Journal, 2025
How The Entire Internet Became AI Slop, Taylor Lorenz YouTube, 2025
Global Streamers Scripted TV Commissions Fell by 24% in H1 2025, Ampere Analysis
YouTube Stars are Still Fighting For Hollywood’s Approval, Bloomberg, 2025
How Generative AI Boosters are Trying To Break Into Hollywood, The Verge, 2025
Artists Have Earned 123m Via Bandcamp Fridays Since 2020, Music Business World, 2024
