Inside India's AI slop economy

India is among the biggest producers of Al slop, or quickly made, Al-generated content. Lounge meets the creators and coaches making money off the latest side of the creator economy

- Shrabonti Bagchi

The Hulk is an unaccountably popular figure in the pantheon of characters that populate AI generated content in India. The Marvel superhero, who first appeared in 1962 in the comic The Incredible Hulk by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, has been reborn in Indian AI content as "Hulku", "Hulkeshwar", and "Hulkanand", and has featured in thousands of user-generated AI videos. He is usually a villager, often bullied by a frail Indian grandmother who orders him around and makes him do household chores. He is also teased by village bullies, scolded by elders, and asked why he's not married.

So popular is the Hulk genre on platforms that many popular YouTube channels have viral video tutorials on making a Hulk video in three easy steps, including readymade lists of story-writing prompts that can be fed into ChatGPT to generate a script. Watching these videos, one guesses at the reasons behind their popularity-in one, the Hulk figure is thrown out of a mall for being poorly dressed, and we get glimpses of the fears and insecurities that challenge and motivate a large proportion of the Indian population. What looks like disposable AI "slop" is actually the most visible side of a fast-growing creator economy-one that platforms encourage, monetise, but, contradictorily, try to disown.