Paid actors, AI writing: How a new kind of video business cashed in on America’s divided politics
‘Ghost creators’ are reaching millions of viewers with nearly identical, sensationalized videos that take aim at Democrats.
In August 2023, a middle-aged man named William appeared on camera in front of his kitchen table, reading a script about New York City's mayor. The video quickly garnered over 474,000 views. Similarly, a creator named Omar, who claimed to be based in New York and had a shaggy beard, read a report about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her ex on June 2023, amassing more than 250,000 views.
Both videos featured ominous music and were produced by a network of interconnected videos affiliated with a growth-hacking company promising to be the "strongest alternative to paid ads." The network had gathered over 45 million views and 90,000 comments on YouTube, along with millions of additional impressions across social platforms like TikTok.
Caleb Chan, a student at the University of Chicago in 2022, was developing a financial news and stock-picking YouTube channel called Casgains Academy. Inspired by his ambitions, he started promoting Virelox, a platform claiming to quickly spin up creator accounts and go viral for clients. In April 2023, Chan had more than 106 YouTube accounts up and running, targeting billions of views every month.
He claimed the success was due to "ghost creators" who read nearly identical scripts, some generated or aided by large-language models. The rise of these sensationalized, low-quality YouTube videos, driven by the algorithm's appetite for news content and an audience of cord-cutters and older online users, has created a new kind of clickbait, raising concerns among political figures and sparking debates about the future of digital media.
Written by urgent.news from Semafor's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
