AI melodramas are flooding X—and paying creators

A fictional mother facing prison, a framed courtroom defendant, and a 9-year-old son carrying a blue backpack: this is the formula behind one of the AI-generated melodramas spreading across X.

The thread’s narrator did not exist. Its creator, a self-identified 21-year-old stock trader in Nigeria using the handle BIGBEN, told WIRED that he uses Grok or ChatGPT to write the stories. X pays him through its Creative Revenue Sharing program, with typical payments of $500 to $700 every two weeks. Other creators told WIRED they earn thousands of dollars per payment cycle.

How X pays viral posts

X’s revenue-sharing program rewards posts that generate engagement. To qualify, a creator must:

• Be an X Premium user
• Have at least 500 verified followers
• Generate at least 5 million impressions over the previous three months

The program is intended to support “authentic, high-quality content,” but its emphasis on reach also creates an incentive for rage bait, recycled material, and fabricated stories. In May 2025, X sued eight Vietnamese creators and 25 “John Does,” alleging that they used fake AI-generated content and bot-driven comments to fraudulently collect payments.

Recommended reading

X ends advertising boycott lawsuit with WFA

In April, X moved to reduce payments to “aggregators” that mainly reposted news from elsewhere and threatened sanctions against accounts that overused the BREAKING label. On July 16 of this year, the company said it had removed millions of posts that republished content originally created by others.

X did not answer WIRED’s questions about how it treats AI-generated fiction. The company is now part of xAI, which is itself part of SpaceX.

The formula behind AI melodramas

Most of the posts present themselves as true first-person accounts, even though their fabrication is usually apparent. Their authors often identify themselves as storytellers, while the writing follows a remarkably consistent structure: an innocent person is wronged, then a hidden fact arrives to punish the antagonist and restore justice.

Rob Cover, a professor at Australia’s RMIT Digital Ethnography Research Centre, described the pattern as highly formalized. The opening typically involves someone being fired, evicted, scammed, denied a rightful place on public transport, or subjected to what the story presents as judicial overreach.

“The underdog is redeemed while the adversary is defeated, humiliated, and shamed (often as a representation of a public shaming).”

The reveal often depends on sealed documents, recordings, or other evidence that overturns a divorce dispute, inheritance fight, or family conflict. Other versions are smaller: an airline passenger refuses to surrender an assigned seat to rude fellow travelers, who are then sent to the back of the plane in a public humiliation.

These posts can attract hundreds of thousands or millions of views, along with hundreds of likes and dozens of reposts. Some of the traffic may come from bots, but the engagement is still enough to make the format financially attractive.

From prompt to payout

Jenna Russell, a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland studying AI writing, said the creators appear to be optimizing for speed and engagement rather than originality.

“I think these spammers have simply optimized for the least effort and the most engagement, which means using easy, well-known tropes and prompting AI to write something that fits the bill.”

BIGBEN was the only one of several storytellers contacted by WIRED who agreed to discuss his process. He initially treated the journalist’s message as a potential business partnership and asked, “Before I give out my leverage, what’s in it for me?”

He later said that, although some stories are based on experiences shared with him, he uses AI to write them. For a new thread, he supplies Grok or ChatGPT with a prompt and publishes the result in installments. One thread, apparently narrated by a second wife abused by her in-laws, reached 1.5 million views in two days.

The courtroom story that began with a mother accused of stealing millions ends with a predictable twist: her son secretly planted a digital recorder in his father’s office, exposing the framing attempt and sending the husband to prison. It is a clean resolution—and an entirely fabricated one, produced to attract clicks and trigger X’s payment system.