This guy named Nigel Richards is a professional Scrabble player from New Zealand, whose brain is not like yours or mine. He wins world championships in languages he doesn’t speak, like Spanish and French. I believe the way he strategizes can be recognized as human thought, but just barely. I mean look:
Richards appears to have eliminated the concept of “words” altogether, turning his brain into an engine designed to arrange tiles with different-value patterns on them into words that lead to wins.
In an age in which the world’s largest entertainment company is YouTube, an algorithmic software ecosystem that delivers user-generated content that knows what you’ll like before it knows what you’ll like, entertainment is like a Scrabble board. And I believe a series of WWE YouTube documentaries apparently made with glitchy AI tools may be a form of primitive, digital Nigel Richards. Perhaps these systems can master the game of video search, not as it should be understood, but purely for the feats that lead to success.
The YouTube video in question, apparently discovered by a game designer and artist named Sam Bailey, also known as Ompuko, has gone viral on Bluesky over the past few days.
An entire operation of unmanned YouTube channels was found that create completely uncontrolled long form slop videos where AI voice simulacra regularly trip and do so for a full ten minutes each time.
All legitimate comments are “No! That’s not true! You lie he didn’t lie” and never accept it.
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– Ompu (@ompu.co) April 27, 2026 at 8:34 pm
They’re supposed to be about WWE storylines and real-world drama, but from time to time the narrator has some kind of momentary ischemic attack that forces him to say “what”, “wow” and “like” with bizarrely intense emphasis, as if he’s trying to stay upright on a ridiculously long rug that’s being pulled out from under him. Then the “what” turns into a murmur. Then the grunting sound of someone being strangled is heard. Soon all you’ll be hearing is the sound of wet mouth. Sometimes this goes on for ten minutes or more, and then the voice over continues as if nothing happened.
Apparently this is a pattern. Other users have noticed the same glitch in other videos from this user, and judging by some, it may have something to do with the pronunciation of “WWE”.
But other YouTube accounts are posting similar videos with the same glitch:
It’s fitting that Alex Wellerstein, a scholar of nuclear war scenarios, was able to read the writing on the wall here, posting on Bluesky, “Anyone who doesn’t want more is being left behind.”
So far, no one has explained exactly who is doing it, how the voice generator malfunctions in such a horrific way, and why the messed up videos are still online. Occam’s Razor suggests that someone is probably spamming the YouTube algorithm on hijacked accounts, and is simply hoping to be picked up by viewers with autoplay turned on.
One of the accounts posting these videos used to post what appears to be personal content in Türkiye about 18 years ago, then became inactive. Then, about a month ago, it started posting WWE documentaries ranging from 20 minutes to an hour or more (how long does a chokehold last) at a rate of about one per day.
A savvy YouTube commenter understood the danger of these videos, posting, “Y’all make sure to delete this from your watch history.” It’s hard not to notice that glitch videos are some of the most popular uploads from these creators. Curiosity clicks help a bit, but people like me who actually sit there and listen to glitches for minutes at a time do two deadly things: demonstrate to the algorithm—and other YouTube users—which bits are interesting, and also help move toward YouTube’s 4,000 watch-hour limit for monetization.
The important thing is that no human creator or gatekeeper needs to take care of this. The person uploading these videos may be completely asleep while driving, not knowing or caring that there are glitches, but still benefiting from them.
We are still in the early days of being careless in our media diet. Being able to make a 2024-era case against AI Art Quite inspiring, but it doesn’t matter. It appears that AI could come out and show that humanity is horribly gobbling up junk, various forms of content free from the constraints of intention that we would consume anyway.
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