Follow the Money: The Podcast

Summer series | Profits, not politics, behind AI hate boom

Episode Summary

Persecution, corruption, and even murder. In this summer series, Emma du Chatinier and Lise Witteman unpack recent groundbreaking stories by fellow journalists from across Europe. How did their investigations impact society? And what does their journalism reveal about the state of European democracy? In this episode: Journalist Niamh McIntyre went deep into the world of hateful content on social media, investigating the people posting so-called AI slop. She was shocked: many of the creators were not at all what you might expect. And some weren’t even aware that the videos they were profiting from were racist or Islamophobic. Emma and Lise speak to Niamh about the rise of AI-generated misinformation, the financial incentives driving its creation, and how Meta is to blame. “These content creators aren’t an anomaly. They’re producing the internet that Big Tech companies and AI companies want.”