“AI slop” might just spawn the next YouTube, driven by a new AI-native creative class: The Generators. After sharing this thought on the @WithDelphi Library of Minds podcast, I’ve gotten a ton of follow-up questions, so here’s a deeper dive... Consumer AI in 2025 rhymes with Consumer Mobile in 2008. Like early mobile, we’re seeing both potential giants and flash-in-the-pan fads. In 2008, the top apps in the App Store were Facebook, Flashlight and iPint (a game that let you drink a virtual pint by tilting your phone). Only one became an enduring business. As aggregation theory reminds us, the best consumer companies aggregate massive networks of demand or supply (h/t @benthompson). Everything else gets commoditized. Beware vibe revenue (h/t @gregisenberg). Many current apps generate revenue from curiosity, novelty, or FOMO, with high initial conversion and fast growth, but poor long-term retention. As competition increases, products will commoditize and pricing will drop. We need to separate temporary revenue from sustainable businesses. Still, don’t dismiss “small” beginnings. YouTube started with silly homemade videos like keyboard cat, Numa Numa, and Chocolate Rain. Then came Ryan Higa’s sketches, Justin Bieber’s discovery, and OK Go’s treadmill music video. Over time, quality rose, legitimacy followed, and YouTube became the world’s largest video platform. Similarly, TikTok began as Musical.ly with teens dancing and lipsyncing before evolving into a global entertainment engine. In consumer, what seems trivial or lowbrow can be the wedge into something massive. Is “AI slop” this generation’s cat videos? What critics dismiss as junk is often content that would’ve been prohibitively expensive or impossible to make without AI: podcasts with historical or fictional guests, Pokemon nature documentaries, cooking shows hosted by animals, romantasy microdramas, Ghibli in real life, Dramione fanvids. These technically imperfect but creatively unbounded experiments are just the first wave of a sea change in UGC content. Every technology shift mints a new creator class that the old guard mocks. Bloggers weren’t “real writers”. Twitter microbloggers weren’t “real bloggers”. YouTubers weren’t “real filmmakers.” Instagram influencers weren’t “real tastemakers”. TikTok teens weren’t “real creators.” Now comes the AI-native generation, the Generators. They conjure worlds instead of filming them, blending ideas, moodboards, scripts, and real footage with prompts and generative AI models. They create, remix, regenerate,and refine until it becomes something new. Today, many are teenagers in their bedrooms, not too different from how prior UGC revolutions began. Over time, this new creator class will become more mainstream: film students making dragons on dorm room budgets, camera-shy solopreneurs sharing their real voices and expertise through avatars, small businesses turning iPhone photos into cinematic ads, scriptwriters becoming their own showrunners, creative directors running one-person agencies. AI doesn’t just lower the cost of creation. It expands who gets to create. When new creators appear, old platforms rarely welcome them. YouTube and TikTok reward face-forward performance, not surrealist fantasy. A new home may rise for the Generators, with audiences who love their worlds and communities who nurture them. For this shift to fully take hold, the underlying models must evolve. As @trymirage founder @gmharhar often says, the AI video race has barely begun. Producing scenes with consistent characters, voices, and styles still takes too much work. We need multimodal video models that can blend real footage and authentic voices with AI VFX. We need orchestration to handle multiple characters, multiple scenes, and multiple camera angles. Apps like Sora, @canofsoup_inc, Captions by @trymirage, @Picsart, and @tavus hint at where this is going, but the creative tools for this new medium are only just being invented. We’re witnessing the dawn of a new creative medium. Like every revolution before it, it’ll look weird and a little "sloppy" before it looks brilliant. -- If you’re a founder, creative, or Generator building in this new wave, we at @Sequoia would love to hear from you. You can reach out via the normal channels to any of our partners, or feel free to pitch my Delphi about the future of consumer AI: delphi.ai/jesslee. --- Thanks to my partner @buckhouse for helping coin the term “Generator” and to ChatGPT for copyediting help. Relevant reading Augmented Imagination by James Buckhouse buckhouse.medium.com/augmented-imag… Playlist of Generator content I mention above tiktok.com/t/ZTHvb3Hha14t… Playlist of the earliest viral YouTube content youtube.com/watch?v=Cqd1Gv… Vibe Revenue by Greg Isenberg x.com/gregisenberg/s… Aggregation Theory by Ben Thompson stratechery.com/2015/aggregati…
