The mass adoption of generative AI has given rise to some bizarre waves of incomprehensible slop.
There was the “good ending,” a glut of AI generated images depicting Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg as starcrossed lovers, which surfaced as their public feud threatened to turn violent. Then of course there was “Shrimp Jesus,” followed closely by the “baby monk,” a disturbing series featuring babies clad in robes being eaten alive by fire ants.
No doubt there are countless other inscrutable trends. But perhaps no gen AI fixation captures our current moment like the one currently swirling thanks to Meta AI, showing a saboteur purposefully crash through a glass-bottom bridge, sending swarms of innocent people careening to their deaths.
“Is that real? Glass bridge accident” reads the caption on one video which snagged over 130,000 views. Another posted from an account called “Lovely moment” shows another woman purposefully smash a glass panel before scampering off as the other panels give way like dominos.
There are dozens of variations on this theme, usually showing an elderly white woman or a character with a heavily stereotyped racial identity smashing the bridge with a large rock. Each follows the same tried-and-true formula to churn out viral slop: a shocking action incites a panic, which ends only seconds later, either in horrible tragedy or in sentimental euphoria.
One mockingly uploaded to X-formerly-Twitter went viral, nabbing over 32 million views. It shows an older, heavy-set woman with a smile plastered on her face jumping backward and crashing through the glass floor, with an extended outro involving a golden retriever saving a drowning baby from the river below.
“Opened Facebook and Reels autoplayed. First reel had 57k likes and 12,000 comments,” the poster said. “Comments were overwhelmingly impressed old people praising a dog… the AI slop has escaped containment.”
While some of the videos uploaded to Facebook feature a disclaimer that the content was AI generated, the vast majority do not. And though a handful have seemingly managed to captivate thousands of viewers, many are posted to small, AI-heavy accounts, snagging only a few comments and reactions.
So what’s really going on here?
As many commentors have pointed out, the glass bridge slop, like its predecessors, is a telltale symptom of “dead internet theory.” Originating as a web forum conspiracy, dead internet theory essentially claims that most of what we’ve seen on the internet has been fake since at least 2016.
While some more paranoid proponents believe that various shadow governments might be behind the phenomenon, there is a kernel of truth to dead internet theory: that social media has been so utterly commodified that content engagement takes priority over human connection.
This was essentially confirmed in an anti-trust lawsuit seeking to prove that Zuckerberg’s Meta held an illegal monopoly over social media. In order to argue this was not the case — and avoid breaking up his billion-dollar corporate empire — Zuckerberg switched gears, painting Facebook as an “entertainment space” rather than a social media platform.
“The friend part has gone down quite a bit,” Zuckerberg testified, adding that Facebook’s core purpose “wasn’t really to connect with friends anymore” — a reality these glass bridge videos make abundantly clear.
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