{"id":582541,"date":"2026-08-12T15:58:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-12T15:58:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/582541\/"},"modified":"2026-08-12T15:58:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T15:58:11","slug":"nightmare-fodder-rokus-ai-slop-channel-is-even-worse-than-expected-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/582541\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Nightmare fodder\u2019: Roku\u2019s AI slop channel is even worse than expected | Television"},"content":{"rendered":"

The appeal of Roku<\/a> is that, whatever you happen to want to watch, there will almost certainly be a live channel for it. Just want to watch Little House on the Prairie<\/a>? There\u2019s a channel for it. Just want to watch Duck Dynasty? There\u2019s a channel for that too. Purely want to watch nothing but local news from Wisconsin? Guess what: there\u2019s a channel for that too.<\/p>\n

But despite this wealth, a section of the population was still to see its needs fulfilled. What about people who hate plot and vision and the sight of people speaking convincing dialogue that synchronises perfectly with the movement of their lips? What about the people who just want to watch an unyielding torrent of eerily weightless nightmare fodder? Well, good news. Roku has finally caught up.<\/p>\n

It was reported last week that Roku launched the Fairground AI Creator TV channel<\/a>, the first free, all-AI<\/a> streaming channel that pulls content from roughly 100 AI creators around the world. Early reactions were, to put it mildly, not great. The Verge compared<\/a> it to eating from a trough, while Futurism called it<\/a> \u201cbottom-of-the-barrel slop\u201d.<\/p>\n

In truth, you will not watch Fairground AI Creator TV, and that\u2019s sort of the point. This is television with vanishingly low production costs. Compare an hour of this cheap slop with, say, the tens of millions of dollars it takes to produce an episode of Stranger Things<\/a>, and you\u2019ll soon understand why executives might find the prospect irresistible. In this landscape you don\u2019t need breakout hits, just enough stoned and curious students at 3am to turn a profit.<\/p>\n

That said, I have actually just spent a few hours watching Fairground AI Creator TV, more out of self-hatred than anything else, and it would appear that the early reviews are right. On the plus side, the channel is evidence that artificial intelligence has come on in leaps and bounds over the last couple of years. Had this been attempted in 2023, we would have had a 24\/7 feed of mutant Will Smith choking down handfuls of writhing spaghetti<\/a>, and everyone would have vomited themselves dry. Generally speaking, what Fairground has to offer is much better.<\/p>\n

However, it is still awful. Categorically, catastrophically awful. The channel doesn\u2019t so much offer shows as a drifting dreamscape of bad ideas rendered as horribly as possible with no thought paid to scheduling. At one point on Wednesday, a shrill high-frequency anime gave way to a long and staid German-language short about Nazi bureaucracy. After that came a sort of Gladiator ripoff that had all the dynamism of an exhibit you\u2019d see at the fourth-best museum on a poorly planned family holiday.<\/p>\n

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In fact, as an aside, there seems to be an awful lot of this. Switch on Fairground at any time of day and I\u2019d estimate you are no more than 15 minutes away from seeing a witless, sepia historical drama of some description, full of craggy, burly men glowering at each other, dramatically lit by sunset regardless of which direction they\u2019re facing. There is so much of it that it worries me about the future of the medium. The promise of AI<\/a> is that it allows limitless story potential, and yet the bulk of it ends up looking like what would happen if your dad lucked himself a job scheduling Sunday afternoons on ITV3.<\/p>\n

There are still horrible glitches to navigate \u2013 stray mouths that don\u2019t move in time with dialogue, impossible physics, one specific instance of a man trudging through snow while his feet bizarrely made a clip-cloppy hoof noise \u2013 but these are becoming less and less frequent as the technology improves. The bad news about this is that you\u2019re forced to concentrate on the storytelling ability of the people who made this. And you simply cannot.<\/p>\n

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Because it \u2013 all of it, every last stinking second of every godawful film \u2013 is completely inert. It is devoid of weight, of life, of vision and wit. The channel just flatly sits there, impressed by itself despite being physically unable to hold anybody\u2019s attention. You may as well be watching a screensaver, a CD-Rom menu screen or a fridge.<\/p>\n

The hope is obviously that something like Fairground will be the future of entertainment, churning out muck for pennies while an entire strata of creatives go hungry. And who knows, one day it might achieve this. The technology is moving so quickly that it isn\u2019t impossible to see it eventually developing the capacity to convincingly entertain.<\/p>\n

But on the basis of what I\u2019ve seen, that day is still a long way off. At one point, the channel cut away to a commercial for Roku\u2019s Dr Phil channel, and the sight of an actual flesh-and-blood human acting in an identifiably human way almost moved me to tears. And surely anything that makes you emotional about Dr Phil of all people doesn\u2019t deserve to exist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The appeal of Roku is that, whatever you happen to want to watch, there will almost certainly be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":582542,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[146,85,46,411],"class_list":["post-582541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=582541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582541\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/582542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=582541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=582541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=582541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}