There’s a guy named Nigel Richards. He’s a professional Scrabble player from New Zealand, but his brain isn’t like yours or mine. He won world championships in languages he didn’t speak, including Spanish and French. I think the way he formulates strategies can be recognized as human thinking, but just barely. I mean, look:
Richards seems to have completely abstracted the concept of “words” and converted his brain into an engine designed to place tiles with patterns of different values in an order that leads to victory.
In an era when the world’s largest entertainment company is YouTube, an algorithmic software ecosystem that delivers user-generated content that knows in advance what users will like, entertainment is like a Scrabble board. And I believe that the series of WWE YouTube documentaries made using clearly faulty AI tools are just some kind of primitive, digital Nigel Richards. Perhaps these systems can master the game of video discovery, purely for exploits that lead to success, rather than the game of video discovery as intended.
The YouTube video in question appears to have been unearthed by game designer and artist Sam Blye, also known as ompuco, and has gone viral on Bluesky over the past day or so.
We discovered that an unattended YouTube channel was creating long slop videos that were completely unchecked, and the AI’s voice simulation was failing regularly, doing this for a full 10 minutes each time.
All the very legitimate comments are like “No, that’s not true! You’re not lying” and never admit it.
[image or embed]
— Ompuco (@ompu.co) April 27, 2026 8:34 p.m.
They’re supposed to be about WWE plotlines and real-world drama, but the narrator occasionally seems to be having some kind of transient ischemic attack, saying “what,” “oops,” and “love” with strange emphasis, as if he’s trying to stay upright on a comically long rug that’s been pulled out from under him. Then the “what” turns into a growl. Then the moans turned into the sound of a person being strangled. Eventually, all you hear is the sound of wet mouths. In some cases, this can last for more than 10 minutes, after which the narration continues as if nothing happened.
This seems to be the pattern. Other users have noticed the same glitch in other videos by this user, and judging by some, it may have something to do with the pronunciation of “WWE.”
However, other YouTube accounts have posted similar videos with similar glitches.
It’s no wonder nuclear war scenario scholar Alex Wellerstein can read the writing on the wall here, posting on Blue Sky: “Those who don’t want more will be left behind.”
So far, no one has reported exactly who is doing this, how the audio generator suffered a catastrophic failure, and why the faulty video is still online. Occam’s Razor suggests that someone is probably spamming the YouTube algorithm on a hijacked account, turning on autoplay and just hoping it gets picked up by viewers.
One of the accounts posting these videos started posting what appeared to be personal content in Turkish about 18 years ago, but has since gone dormant. About a month ago, he began streaming WWE documentaries, ranging from 20 minutes to over an hour long (depending on how long the strangulation sound lasts), at a rate of about one a day.
One astute YouTube commenter seemed to understand the dangers of these videos, posting, “Guys, make sure to delete this from your watch history.” It would be hard not to notice that glitchy videos are some of the most popular uploads by these creators. Clicking out of curiosity helps a bit, but people like me who actually sit there and listen to glitches for minutes at a time are doing two insidious things: demonstrating to the algorithm and other YouTubers which parts are interesting, and helping build towards YouTube’s monetization benchmark of 4,000 watch hours.
Importantly, no human creator or gatekeeper needs to pay attention to any of this. The uploaders of these videos may not know or care that there is a problem and may be completely asleep at the wheel, but they are benefiting from it anyway.
We are still in the early stages of breaking into the media diet. AI claims in 2024 art Quite convincing, but maybe not important. AI can apparently come out of nowhere and show humanity that it has a terrifying grasp on the junk we would consume anyway, a form of content freed from the constraints of intent.
