An X post tells of a mother in federal court, set to lose her freedom, rescued when her 9-year-old son walks in carrying an old blue backpack. The narrator is not the mother on trial, but a self-identified 21-year-old stock trader in Nigeria who uses AI to generate stories and gets paid for them by X, according to WIRED.
How X pays for engagement
The Creative Revenue Sharing program pays for posts that boost engagement on the platform. To join, a creator must become a Premium X user, have at least 500 verified followers, and have drawn a minimum of 5 million impressions in the previous three-month period, WIRED reported. X says the goal is to encourage “authentic, high-quality content,” and some of that money does go to legitimate creators. But paying for viral posts makes the program “ripe for exploitation,” WIRED noted. Some creators engage in “rage baiting,” using outrageous content to draw comments and views.
Enforcement: lawsuits, payment cuts, and removals
X has answered with both policy changes and legal action. According to WIRED:
- In May 2025, X sued 8 Vietnamese creators and 25 “John Does”, alleging they fraudulently drew money from the program by posting phony AI-generated content and boosting engagement with bot-driven comments.
- In April, X moved to cut the payments of “aggregators” who primarily posted news from other sources, and threatened sanctions against those who overused the BREAKING tag.
- On July 16 of this year, X revealed it had removed millions of posts that purloined already-published content posted by others.
| Date | Action |
|---|---|
| May 2025 | Lawsuit against 8 Vietnamese creators and 25 John Does over phony AI content and bot-boosted engagement |
| April | Payment cuts for aggregators; sanctions warning over BREAKING-tag abuse |
| July 16 | Removal of millions of posts that reused others’ published content |
Anatomy of a viral melodrama
The posts follow a structure “as formalized as a sonnet,” Rob Cover, a professor at Australia’s RMIT Digital Ethnography Research Centre who studies AI-generated content, told WIRED. First comes a rage-baiting setup “in which an innocent person is wrongfully fired, evicted, scammed, loses their rightful place on public transport, or is the subject of judicial overreach.”
“The underdog is redeemed while the adversary is defeated, humiliated, and shamed (often as a representation of a public shaming),” says Rob Cover, professor at RMIT Digital Ethnography Research Centre.
Many tales feature narrators holding sealed documents that turn the table on tormentors in divorce or estate disputes, or an airline passenger who fiercely retains an assigned seat when rude moochers claim it. The stories routinely gather hundreds of thousands to millions of views, hundreds of likes, and dozens of reposts, though some of that may be bot traffic, WIRED reported. Most are falsely presented as true first-person narratives, even though creator profiles often describe the authors as storytellers.
“It’s hard to prove that the actual authors are AI models, but the vast majority bear the signs,” WIRED wrote. “The posts are manipulative and dumb and anything but authentic.” X, now part of xAI, which is itself now part of SpaceX, would not answer questions about the content, WIRED reported.
Enterprise implications
The episode shows how performance-based monetization creates financial incentives for AI-generated content at scale, and how a major platform is forced into lawsuits and rule changes to police that abuse. WIRED observed that the numbers reveal “a hunger for fairness” among audiences. For enterprise teams building or buying AI content-generation tools, the case underscores the need for content provenance and authenticity detection when AI-generated material is published under a trusted brand.
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