It is 12:04 p.m., and I’ve been watching AI slop for the past three hours. Before me on the screen, a man is playing trumpet in fog. He’s been fired (bad market for trumpet players) but then, at last, he lands an interview. Trumpet Man sits at a large desk across from an obese fellow who asks how good he is with a mop. (Smash cut.) Trumpet Man is now in a janitor uniform with a name tag reading V. Helsing. Oh, he’s a musician-janitor turned vampire slayer. My stomach grumbles in anticipation of lunch as the video feed shifts to a new scene: An animated vampire bellows, “I am what I was born to be: Dracula!” A dull ache forms around my temples.
This is Fairground AI Creator TV, a new channel on Roku’s free, ad-supported streaming television (FAST) service. The channel curates and plays AI-generated short films from creators all over the world 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and has limited commercial interruption. (Some of the advertisements are also AI-generated.) Roku has hundreds of these FAST channels—live news, marathon programming of Murder, She Wrote, et cetera—and some are quite popular: The flagship Roku Channel, which rotates between a smattering of movies and live TV, reached an estimated 145 million people in 2024, according to the company. But Fairground is the first of its kind, which, depending on your point of view, may be a glimpse at the future of unconstrained imagination in media or a dystopian nightmare.
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There is no easy way to start watching Fairground. Many of the films are grouped according to a theme—sci-fi, documentary, fantasy—but much of the broadcast is contextless. A three-minute comedic short might be followed by a 20-minute drama. Because generative AI is evolving so quickly, the quality varies aggressively from film to film, depending on which models a creator used to make the video and when the film was made. One of the Lord of the Rings rip-offs that I watched during an eight-hour binge had the gauzy, uncanny look of early generative AI, and the characters’ mouths were wildly out of sync with their voices.
Another of Fairground’s offerings, a talk show called Paws for Thought, hosted by a dog and cat, legitimately made me question my sanity. (Episodes titles include: “What Is the Job of a Bumblebee?,” “How Do You Tell the Difference Between a Boy Turkey and a Girl Turkey?,” “What Does a Person’s Size Have to Do With Anything?,” and, of course, “Animal Cruelty—Recognizing the Signs and Addressing the Causes.”) At one point, during an episode titled “Who Was Mr. Rogers?,” an animated cat that has a halting, robotic text-to-speech voice offers a short history of the famous children’s-show host before—why not?—pivoting to a Zoom interview with its mother. “Your dad and I are very proud of you,” the mother cat says.
Although Fairground’s Best of AI collections invite the viewer to “come see what happens when imagination has no ceiling,” each video feels cut from the same cloth. Even in the most well-constructed videos—the ones that seem to have genuine scripts and plots you can follow—the vibes are immediately off. Generative AI, for all of its utility, is a homogenizing technology. Despite being trained on the glorious quirks of humankind’s creative canon, the models push our ersatz artistic output into a bland, muddled middle ground. The majority of content that I consumed on Fairground was aimless and forgettable—offensive in how persistently inoffensive even the strangest entries ultimately were. Watching these videos feels like speaking with another human through a translator or reading CliffsNotes instead of the prose of a novel—you get the gist, but something ineffable and decidedly human is lost in the process.
The longer I watched Fairground’s channel, the more I felt like I was trapped in some kind of contextless dream state. A man appears on a billboard in Times Square to deliver a message that the world is going to end in 48 hours. “I know. I’ve been calculating this for two years. Trust me,” he says, before adding that “sovereignty needs a planet to exist on.” Seconds later, that same man is engaged in a slow-motion martial-arts fight scene. Out of nowhere, a title card pops up that says Last Fight. With no explanation, a tidal wave as tall as a skyscraper envelops a city. Credits roll. Then the next film starts: A man who bears an alarming resemblance to the political writer Matt Yglesias wanders through a field of wildflowers.
As the hours ticked by, I noticed that the edges of real life started to fray ever so slightly. When my attention wandered while I watched yet another futuristic car glide through yet another synthetic environment, I tapped over to my social-media feeds. I came across a cute picture of a sea turtle that looked like it was waving at the camera. I smiled and then was suddenly paralyzed, realizing that I was unable to tell whether this turtle was real or AI-generated. All of a sudden, the usual buffet of influencers popping up in my Instagram algorithm seemed immediately suspect, perhaps synthetic. In just a few hours, my compass had been scrambled.
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I kept wondering: Who is this for? When I put this question to Colin Petrie-Norris, Fairground’s founder and CEO, he suggested that the project is a work in progress, that the company, the channel, and the technology are all “in the first inning.” He offered up all of the usual bromides about generative AI. “This is as bad as it’ll ever get. It’s going to get better,” he told me. “It’s this democratization of creativity.” He was quick to offer up stories about AI creators he works with, including a child in Senegal who makes movies above his mom and dad’s fish-and-chips shop. Ultimately, Petrie-Norris wants the channel to “earn the attention of a family” sitting down to watch something together.
Petrie-Norris said that Fairground doesn’t blindly license videos, but vets them and works with creators to rewrite scripts and prompts. He mentioned a “kid in his basement in Berlin” whom Fairground has coached on creating better action sequences; the executive also suggested that the “Steven Spielberg of tomorrow” may not be discovered without this new technology.
To his credit, Petrie-Norris has been right before. In 2013, he founded Xumo, one of the earliest FAST streamers, which he later sold to Comcast in a deal reportedly worth more than $100 million. He told me that, in his recent meetings with television companies, there has been a genuine interest in embracing generative AI.
Yet still, who is this for? The best answer seems to be: TV executives. It’s not hard to imagine these folks salivating over endless, potentially customizable, or even interactive programming, all of it passable for background viewing and made without the messy overhead of human staffing. “The Home Slopping Network,” one of my colleagues dubbed it.
You could guess where all of this leads: a professionalized industry of guilds and craftspeople replaced by user-generated content and revenue shares, in which the only way to make a living is to flood the zone, a kind of cinematic version of what’s already happened on social media. “Is it good?” is an irrelevant question, one replaced by more pressing queries such as “Is it passable, modestly engaging, and infinitely replicable?” The early audience numbers are, apparently, promising for Fairground. Petrie-Norris claimed that just a week after launch, Fairground was already “seeing in the millions of people.”
Near the end of my binge, just after an advertisement featuring (the real, I think) Pamela Anderson talking about a new Earth Day channel she’s launching, Fairground ran an interview with one of its featured creators. For the first time in many hours, somebody spoke words that made sense. The purpose of AI, she said, “is not to make less, but to make more.”
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