The AI-Generated Fake Redemption Stories Flooding X (And Getting Paid For It)

For six months, my husband turned even our own daughter against me, convincing everyone I’d stolen millions from the company I built from the ground up. I sat in federal court, certain I was about to lose my freedom, when the heavy courtroom doors swung suddenly open. My nine-year-old son stepped inside, clutching a beat-up old blue backpack, locked eyes with the judge, and said: “Your Honor. I know who framed my mom. They’re sitting right in this room.”

That’s how a viral X thread that popped up in my feed one day opens. I went in knowing the first-person narrator was almost certainly fictional, and that following the thread would lead me into a sappy, formulaic tale where good inevitably triumphs over evil. And sure enough, the creator wasn’t a mother on trial for theft at all: he’s a self-identified 21-year-old stock trader based in Nigeria, who uses AI to generate these stories and gets paid directly by X for posting them.

I learned this after I started questioning why so many of these tight, punchy redemption melodramas kept popping up in my feed. To be fair, it’s my own fault: I sometimes idly click on these cheesy, predictable stories just to see how they end, and X’s algorithm caught on to that habit and served me more.

In this case, the creator is just one of thousands of people benefiting from X’s Creative Revenue Sharing program, which pays creators for posts that drive high engagement on the platform. To qualify for the program, a creator must be an X Premium subscriber, have at least 500 verified followers, and rack up a minimum of 5 million impressions over the prior three months. The stated goal of the program is to support “authentic, high-quality content,” and some of that funding does go to creators making exactly that. But tying payouts directly to viral reach leaves the program wide open for exploitation.

Some creators in the program rely on “rage baiting,” posting deliberately outrageous content to pull in clicks and comments. In May 2025, X sued 8 Vietnamese creators and 25 unidentified “John Does,” accusing them of defrauding the program by posting fake AI-generated content, then inflating engagement with bot-run comment accounts. A month earlier, X moved to cut payments for “aggregators” that primarily repost news from other outlets, and threatened penalties for creators who overused the BREAKING tag just to grab attention. On July 16 this year, X announced it had removed millions of posts that stole already-published content from other creators.

It’s not clear where X stands on the flood of AI-generated story “slop” that has invaded my feed. The company, now part of xAI—which is itself part of SpaceX—declined to answer any of my questions about the trend. Most of these stories are falsely framed as true first-person personal narratives, though it’s usually obvious they’re completely fabricated. In many cases, creators even label themselves “storytellers” directly in their profiles. While it’s hard to prove the full text is written by an AI model, the vast majority check every box for AI output: they’re manipulative, generic, and anything but authentic.

Rob Cover, a professor at Australia’s RMIT Digital Ethnography Research Centre who studies AI-generated content, broke down the rigid structure of these posts for me in an email. It’s as formal and formulaic as a sonnet: First comes a rage-baiting setup “in which an innocent person is wrongfully fired, evicted, scammed, loses their rightful place on public transport, or is the subject of judicial overreach.” This is followed by a clean turnaround: “The underdog is redeemed while the adversary is defeated, humiliated, and shamed (often as a representation of a public shaming),” Cover explains.

Common tropes include narrators holding sealed secret documents that turn the tables on their tormentors, most often in divorce disputes or fights over a relative’s estate. Or the conflict can be as small as an airline passenger fiercely defending their assigned seat from a rude intruder, who is then forced to trudge shamefully to the back of the plane.

These stories are shockingly popular, routinely racking up hundreds of thousands—sometimes millions—of views, plus hundreds of likes and dozens of reposts (though a portion of that engagement is almost certainly bot traffic). Their popularity reveals something fundamental about audience desire: a deep hunger for fairness, and a craving for retribution. Reading these stories gives a quick jolt of dopamine when justice is served, and AI has figured out exactly how to reliably churn out this addictive content we can’t look away from.

Jenna Russell, a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland who studies AI writing, told me generating these mini-melodramas is shockingly simple. “I think these spammers have simply optimized for the least effort and the most engagement, which means using easy, well-known tropes and prompting AI to write something that fits the bill,” she says.

That’s exactly the approach of the creator behind the opening courtroom story, who goes by the handle BIGBEN. He was the only storyteller I contacted who replied to my DM asking about his process. At first, he didn’t grasp how a journalistic interview worked, assuming I was proposing a business partnership: if we uploaded his stories to Backchannel, he suggested, we could both generate revenue. I explained that model wouldn’t work for WIRED, and I just wanted to learn about how he creates his content. “Before I give out my leverage, what’s in it for me?” he asked.

Even so, BIGBEN—who claims to be the 21-year-old Nigerian trader listed in his profile—did share his process. While he says some stories draw from real experiences people have shared with him, he admitted he uses AI to draft the actual posts. When he wants a new story, he just drops a simple prompt into Grok or ChatGPT. The opening post of a thread he shared earlier this week, supposedly told by a second wife abused by her in-laws, gained 1.5 million views in just two days.

X pays him every two weeks through the Creative Revenue Sharing program, and BIGBEN says his paychecks usually land between $500 and $700. Other creators report earning thousands of dollars per payout cycle.

Compared to other viral X content that spreads rage, misinformation, pornography, or stolen work, these stories of protagonist redemption and public villain shaming are fairly harmless. And for anyone curious what happened to the mother on trial in BIGBEN’s opening story, I’ll save you the click: her husband’s frame job was foiled by their 9-year-old son, who hid a digital recorder in dad’s office. The recording cleared the mom and sent the husband to prison. It’s a neat, satisfying ending—but a hollow one, since the whole story was fabricated purely for clicks. That hollow feeling is only likely to become more common as AI-generated writing spreads across social media.

This is an edition of Steven Levy’s Backchannel newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.