Hi,

One of the biggest and weirdest news stories on the internet in the last 2 weeks is a new social media platform called Moltbook. Why, you ask? Being a social media platform doesn’t inherently make it weird…it’s the fact that the platform is specifically designed for AI agents (or bots). No humans are allowed on the platform. Yes, you read that right lol.

You can probably tell this newsletter is about to get weird lol but it’s probably one of the more interesting ones I’ve written in a long time and could forecast a potential future version of the entertainment industry. If what I’m predicting comes true (I hope it doesn’t), we’re in for a wild ride and should all buckle up.

Let’s explore below.

Let’s dive in ⬇️

Before diving into this one (and I’ll preface…it’s a long read), I should note that I generally enjoy using AI. I find the technology fascinating, enjoy learning about it, and think it has the potential to do lots of good. That said…I am not naive and know there are two sides to every coin - things can be used for good but also be used for bad. The below is a forecast into the darker side of what might happen to the entertainment industry if there’s no regulation.

Without sounding too nerdy, an AI “agent” is AI that acts autonomously…meaning it can take action, make decisions, and complete tasks on its own.

With regards to Moltbook, within a week 1.5 million AI agents signed up and essentially started running their own platform. They created communities, started conversations, and debated with each other. While humans can’t directly engage or participate on the platform, they are allowed to watch (over 1 million people did).

My take is that the whole thing was supposed to be a weird experiment but instead, it actually felt like a look into the future.

In a way, what happened with Moltbook is starting to happen in small fragments across almost every creative industry: music, film, publishing, design, podcasting, the creator economy, etc.

New layers to each industry are emerging that don’t involve humans.

It’s called the Zombie Creative Industry and it might already be here without us realizing.

What makes this different from the usual "AI is coming for your job" conversation (which is all over Twitter these days) is that it's not just about using AI to create art. It's about AI engaging in all of the other steps in the process - distributing, curating, consuming, marketing, etc. And at every step, it's doing it at a scale without the need for real people.

I think of it as a zombie loop that kind of looks the same in every industry:

AI-generated content → distributed through AI-curated platforms → promoted by AI recommendation algorithms → "consumed" by AI bot accounts → marketed through AI-generated influencer accounts → measured by bot-inflated analytics → monetized through AI-corrupted ad systems

Let’s look at a few examples…

Music

Music became one of the first creative industries to get fully zombified, because streaming created a single metric with stream counts.

• 50,000 fully AI-generated songs are uploaded to streaming platforms every single day

• 70% of AI-generated music streams are fraud - meaning they are bot-driven, not human listeners

• Spotify has removed 75 million "spammy tracks" in the past year and it's barely made a dent on the total number of songs uploaded

• One person used AI to generate hundreds of thousands of songs and botted streams to steal $10 million in royalties

• Spotify has started to lay off human playlist curators and replace them with AI-driven curation systems

The full zombie loop in music is basically:

AI-generated songs uploaded to DSPs, curated by AI playlists, promoted by AI algorithms, "listened to" by AI bots, generating royalties paid to fake artists. Every dollar that goes to a bot is a dollar taken from a real musician's royalty pool.

We’re also not even at the point of AI being able to distribute AI music to streaming services…right now it’s mostly humans doing it. What happens when an AI agent can make its own AI music and upload it to a place like Tunecore without needing a human? How many songs could it theoretically create and upload on its own to game the system? How do streaming services and distribution platforms stop that at scale?

The crazy part is that it doesn't stop at streaming. Apparently ticket scalping bots purchase an estimated 60% of concert tickets before real fans can buy.

AI also has the ability to clone an artist’s entire merch store in just hours.

Even the last "un-fakeable" part of music (live performance) potentially looks shaky. AI-generated crowd footage is becoming more and more realistic (I personally find this sad) - we could be looking at a future where people manufacture fake crowd footage for social media to make it look like an artist had a sold out show. Unless you were there…how would you know?

The Creator Economy

As crazy as the future might be for music, the creator economy might be worse because it moves faster.

• Research shows there are 278 YouTube channels exclusively uploading AI-generated content that have collectively drawn 63 billion views and 221 million subscribers, generating an estimated $117 million in annual revenue

• Nearly 33% of YouTube content is now AI-generated

I wasn’t even aware of this until doing research but the fastest-growing channel on YouTube, called Masters of Prophecy, is all AI-generated content. It went from a few hundred subscribers to 30 million in 4 months. Literally insane lol.

Everywhere Else

Artists and creators are on the front lines, but the same zombie loop is impacting every other creative industry.

Publishing

Over 50% of books published in Amazon's Success subcategory between August and November 2025 were written by AI. People are starting to plagiarize bestselling books, slightly modify the writing, and then sell competing versions under fake author names. Amazon apparently had to cap how many titles one account can publish per day just to slow this down.

Film & TV

Disney invested $1 billion in OpenAI's Sora.

ByteDance's new AI model can generate deepfake scenes from copyrighted movies.

Entertainment lawyers are now demanding AI clauses in every contract.

Hollywood is bracing for another labor stoppage in 2026 with AI being the central issue.

Podcasting

Over 15,000 AI-generated fake podcasts have been identified on Spotify alone. A single person can produce a polished, multi-host episode (that sounds real) in minutes. The same bot-download fraud that plagues music streaming is now inflating podcast metrics that determine ad rates.

Each industry is different but the pattern is identical everywhere. The only difference is how far along each industry is in the zombie loop.

Advertising

This part is kind of a summary…

These creative industries are ultimately funded by advertising, sponsorship, or direct consumer spending measured by analytics…and those analytics are becoming broken.

• 51% of all internet traffic is now bots - the first time non-human traffic has exceeded human traffic

• Google traffic to publishers dropped 33-38% in the last year

• Bot traffic inflates every metric: pageviews, impressions, click-through rates, engagement rates, conversion rates

Basically…so much of the economics that fund creative work is running on bad data. More marketing teams are making budget decisions based on metrics that are 30-50% artificial. The money is still flowing, but it's increasingly flowing to the wrong places.

The Future: The Extreme Version

Everything I just mentioned above is happening right now, it just hasn’t peaked yet. Let’s keep going and see what worst-case scenario might look like.

Streaming Becomes Harder

Right now, 50,000 AI songs are uploaded every single day and will only continue to grow unless regulations are put in place. Within two to three years, AI-generated tracks could outnumber human-made music 100 to 1 on streaming platforms.

The royalty pool is fixed, meaning it doesn't grow because more songs exist. So as AI content floods in, the per-stream payout for everyone (including real artists) approaches 0.

Streaming potentially becomes economically unviable for human musicians. Not because people stopped listening, but because the pool got diluted by content nobody asked for and nobody is actually listening to.

An independent artist who spends six months writing, recording, and releasing a project earns less from streaming than the AI operation that uploaded 50 tracks that same morning. This future is incredibly sad.

How Do You Prove Your Audience Is Real?

Imagine a manager’s big talking point is that their artist has 2 million monthly listeners and 500K Instagram followers.

In the zombie version, the first question becomes: Prove those people are human / real.

What’s scary is that it will likely become hard to because analytics tools can't distinguish real engagement from bot engagement at scale. The platforms either can't or won't provide verified-human metrics. So the entire system of social proof (the thing that gets artists signed, gets creators brand deals, gets authors publishing contracts, gets podcasters sponsors) may become untrustworthy.

The currency the creative economy runs on (ie attention) could become unverifiable.

In the worst case scenario, this could affect every creator trying to monetize their audience, every brand trying to spend marketing dollars, and every marketing team trying to justify their budget. The entire measurement basis of how the creative economy is measured becomes shaky.

Live Performances

In the short term, live performances, shows, and touring appear to be safe. You can't fake a room full of people right? A real artist on a real stage in front of a real crowd is still the most authentic experience.

But deepfake technology is growing, voice cloning is already indistinguishable, and AI-generated crowd footage is improving fast.

At the extreme end:

• A "concert" is announced

• "Footage" is posted online

• "Fans" review it on social media

• "Merch" is sold through a cloned store

Meanwhile, none of it happened. The artist didn't perform. The crowd didn't exist. The merch was fake…but the social media content looks identical to a real event.

How does a real artist who tours 15 cities over three months compete with a fake artist who "tours" 50 cities simultaneously with zero overhead? How does a real creator who films on-location compete with an AI channel that generates the same content in minutes?

The Parallel Internet

At the very extreme end, the response is fragmentation. Meaning…humans abandon zombie platforms and build parallel, verified-human-only platforms.

• Invite-only communities

• Authenticated platforms

• Physical-first distribution

The internet splits into two layers: the bot internet (infinite, free, fake) and the human internet (smaller but real).

We're already seeing early signals, especially in the music industry.

• Discord communities

• Patreon

• D2C storefronts

• Artists selling directly to fans

In the most extreme version, the internet as we know it becomes a bot playground that people stop trusting.

What To Do

This isn't something individual people can solve alone. The platforms and institutions that run these ecosystems need to act before the zombie loop runs past the point of no return.

YouTube is leading with the most aggressive response so far:

• Mandatory AI disclosure labels on all AI-generated content

• Demonetizing AI slop at scale — thousands of channels removed from the Partner Program

• Rejecting AI music from Content ID when it shows repetitive patterns or shared datasets

• Building likeness detection tools so creators can flag deepfakes of their face and voice

Platforms could implement:

Human verification for monetization. If you want to earn money on a platform, you have to prove you're a person in the form of ongoing verification tied to content output patterns. If an account uploads 500 songs in a week, that would clearly not be human. If a channel publishes three videos a day with zero on-camera presence, it gets flagged. Make verification a requirement for accessing things.

Separate economics for AI content. AI-generated music shouldn't dilute the same royalty pool as human music just like AI-generated books shouldn't rank in the same bestseller lists as human published books. Platforms can create separate lanes…That way AI content exists but doesn’t cannibalize the economics of human creators.

Transparency reports. What percentage of streams, views, downloads, and engagement are flagged as artificial? Platforms can publish this quarterly. It would allow the market, the artists, and advertisers to decide what to do with that information.

Counterfeit enforcement at the platform level. Amazon, Shopify, and every e-commerce platform can deploy AI-powered detection of AI-powered counterfeiting. The same technology being used to create fake merch stores and knockoff books can be used to catch them.

Bottom Line

The zombie creative industry is already here in some ways. From music to the creator economy to film to publishing to design, every layer is being infiltrated by AI producing non-human content for non-human audiences, measured by non-human metrics, funded by advertising dollars based on non-human data.

And if nothing changes, the extreme version outlined above could actually happen.

What’s funny though is that this technology that threatens to replace our creative efforts is the same technology that makes being human literally the most authentic thing we can be.

It’ll be interesting to see where this all goes.

Hopefully this was helpful on your journey.

Thanks for reading, until next time.

_{The Vault}

 1) Emergent - my cousin actually introduced me to this one! It’s similiar to Lovable, a platform that can be used for building web applications with AI but Emergent has more integrations. For example, it recently just integrated with Claude Sonnet 4.5 More info HERE