You’ve probably seen one already. A first-person post opens with a woman on trial for stealing millions from the company she built, framed by her own husband. Then the courtroom doors swing open and her 9-year-old son walks in clutching a blue backpack, ready to unmask the real villain. It’s melodrama distilled to its purest, most clickable form — and almost none of it is real.
These bite-sized tales of redemption are flooding X, racking up hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of views. Behind them isn’t a wronged mother but, in one case, a self-described 21-year-old stock trader in Nigeria who feeds prompts to Grok or ChatGPT and posts the results. He goes by the handle BIGBEN, and he gets paid for it.
The engine here is X’s Creative Revenue Sharing program, which rewards posts that drive engagement. To qualify, a creator must hold Premium status, have at least 500 verified followers, and clock a minimum of 5 million impressions over a rolling three-month period. The stated goal is “authentic, high-quality content.” The unintended consequence is a gold rush for anyone who can manufacture outrage at scale.
The formula is rigid enough to be a genre. Rob Cover, a professor at Australia’s RMIT Digital Ethnography Research Centre, describes it as being “as formalized as a sonnet.” First comes the rage-baiting setup — an innocent person wrongfully fired, evicted, scammed, or hauled before a judge. Then the turnaround, where the underdog is vindicated and the adversary is publicly humiliated. Sealed documents surface. Rude passengers are marched to the back of the plane. Justice, reliably, prevails.
That structure works because it exploits something in us. Each tidy ending delivers a small dopamine hit of fairness restored. “These spammers have simply optimized for the least effort and the most engagement,” says Jenna Russell, a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland studying AI writing — easy tropes, plus an AI prompted to fill in the blanks.
The money is real, even if the stories aren’t. BIGBEN says his checks arrive every two weeks and usually land between $500 and $700; others claim to pull in thousands per cycle. One of his recent threads, narrated by a supposed second wife abused by her in-laws, hit 1.5 million views in two days.
X has been swatting at parts of this ecosystem. In May 2025 it sued 8 Vietnamese creators and 25 “John Does” over allegedly fraudulent AI-generated posts inflated by bot comments. In April it moved against news “aggregators” and abusers of the BREAKING tag. On July 16 of this year it said it had removed millions of posts that recycled others’ content. But where the platform stands on fabricated first-person story slop remains unclear — xAI, now folded into SpaceX, declined to comment.
These fables are relatively harmless next to porn, misinformation and stolen content. Still, there’s a hollowness to a heartwarming ending engineered purely for clicks — a feeling that, as AI writing spreads, may become all too familiar.
