How AI slop bypasses reason to hack your feelings
Chinese parents using AI to shame their adult children into marriage aren’t weird. They’re just ahead of the curve.
If you see an AI-generated video, watch out! Someone is trying to manipulate your emotions for their own benefit.
While TikTok users are caught up in the “Benadryl Challenge” and “SkinnyTok,” the Chinese version of TikTok is embracing “regret videos,” whereby aging parents with unmarried offspring use AI to try to frighten their kids into marriage.
(The Chinese TikTok, called Douyin, is also owned by ByteDance. Both versions serve the Chinese Communist Party’s objectives. While TikTok serves viral hedonistic “brain rot” videos and superficial distractions to dumb down the world, Douyin is a state-sanctioned social engineering tool prioritizing educational content, self-development, pro-family memes, and shopping.)
The shaming videos use AI to “age” women, showing them bitter and alone, often in hospitals, juxtaposed to happy women with their families.
Some have dialog, such as: “I regret it. My parents told me to get married and have kids. I didn’t listen, thinking it was too much trouble. Look at me now!,” according to one report.
The trend reminds me of two things. The first is the late 19th-century weaponization of the word “spinster” to terrify girls and women into abandoning the hope for Mr. Right and instead accepting Mr. Right Now to avoid the dreaded “spinster” life of loneliness and failure.
The second is that it reminds me of nearly every use of AI-generated pictures and video. Besides cheap marketing, AI is otherwise used most effectively for disinformation, political propaganda, and fraud.
Specifically, AI-generated imagery is often used explicitly to evoke in others the emotions you want others to feel: fear, revulsion, outrage and pity.
AI-generated slop often seeks to bypass reason and get straight at emotions. It replaces words with pictures. Often, the pictures make no sense, and that hardly matters. The aim is emotion.
AI image generation or manipulation is truly amazing technology. But so far, its main application — by liars, political propagandists, fraudsters, and the Chinese parents of unmarried women — is to instill targeted emotions. Just type in the desired emotions you want others to feel, and post.
So a great response to any AI-generated picture or image you encounter — and we now know that more than 20% of YouTube videos recommended to new users are AI slop — is suspicion.
Always ask: What is someone trying to make me feel, and why?
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This gets to the heart of the problem: AI isn’t persuasive because it’s intelligent, it’s persuasive because it’s affective. Once images replace words, reason is optional. The historical parallel to “spinster” rhetoric is especially telling—same emotional lever, just automated and amplified. The closing question is the right one: not “is this real?” but “what am I being pushed to feel, and why?” That’s the literacy gap we haven’t caught up to yet.