I watched a launch clip on X where a 21-year-old founder smiled and announced he would “kill the internet.” You felt the grin through the screen—no apology, only a business plan. That moment was a rehearsal for an industry shift.
I’m going to tell you what that shift looks like, why it’s dangerous, and how money is greasing the gears. You’ll see familiar names—Doublespeed, a16z, Floodify—but the playbook has changed: profit now depends on mimicry and decay.
At a pitch event a founder flashed a launch video and bragged about creating an army of fake influencers.
Doublespeed, which announced a $1,000,000 (€930,000) seed check from Andreessen Horowitz, pitches itself as efficiency: scale influence cheaply and charge per conversion. The company’s CEO, Zuhair Lakhani, leaned into dystopia in a New York Magazine profile—because attention is the product and controversy is the shortcut.
That’s not bravado; it’s a market signal. You don’t need perfect AI profiles, only plausible ones. Humans still nudge the accounts today, but investors are buying the future where bots act on their own. The pitch is simple: ape authenticity enough to monetize it. That approach is a Trojan horse for commerce in social feeds.
announcing our vc-backed bot farm to accelerate the dead internet. https://t.co/uQbg9gb3Iz pic.twitter.com/puRfdXLR0h
— Zuhair Lakhani (@rareZuhair) October 28, 2025
On your feed right now you probably scroll past accounts that were engineered to look accidental.
Companies like Floodify and creative shops such as Chaotic Good Projects have shown how to seed narratives, amplify clips, and manufacture breakout moments—remember the Geese buzz covered by Wired and the clip-farming rise that Bloomberg traced to creators like Clavicular. That machine treats attention as an input you can program until the output looks viral.
How do AI-driven bot farms work?
They stitch together content templates, account metadata, and timing strategies, then scale variations to test which combinations spike engagement. Initially humans curate tone and responses; the models learn from those signals. Platforms such as X, TikTok, and Instagram provide the distribution; analytics tools and ad platforms provide conversion metrics. You end up paying less for reach and more for control.
Are fake influencers legal?
Legality is messy. The FTC has disclosure rules for sponsored content, and regulators are starting to chase clear violations. Still, many of these operations sit in gray zones: they don’t call posts “ads,” they rely on algorithmic amplification instead of paid placement, and they mutate faster than enforcement. That friction buys time for entrepreneurs and investors to monetize before the rules catch up.
In the mainstream press a profile noted Doublespeed’s 6,000-company waitlist as proof of demand.
That number—reported in New York Magazine—is a symptom: brands want scale and they want it cheap. For VCs like a16z, funding a company that promises engineered virality is a bet that attention markets will keep paying for reach, even if the product erodes trust.
Other players have built entire businesses around engineered trends: clipping farms that chop long videos into snackable hits, marketing consultancies that seed “authentic” discovery, and firms that buy millions of micro-interactions to game recommendation systems. Vulture and Wired traced techniques; Bloomberg followed outcomes. The pattern is clear: the incentives favor short-term velocity over any allegiance to truth.
At a regulator hearing, lawmakers asked whether incentives should be reshaped to stop this behavior.
Investors and founders will argue that this is marketing evolution. You’ll hear comparisons to past adtech shifts and to influence campaigns tested by political actors. But this time the instruments are cheaper and the scale is automated. A handful of checks—like a16z’s million-dollar seed—can fund operations that degrade public attention at industrial speed.
The industry treats attention like a resource to mine, and the result can be like termites in the foundation of public discourse.
On balance you must decide if preserving attention markets matters enough to act.
Platforms have tools—content labeling, stronger disclosure enforcement, friction for mass account creation—and regulators have levers: clearer advertising rules, penalties for deceptive networks, and mandates for transparency. The FTC has reopened inquiries into AI ad practices before; history suggests enforcement lags behind product cycles.
If you work in product or policy, your moves will change incentives. If you buy ads or run a brand, your choices tell the market what behavior to reward. If you’re a reader, your attention is the currency underwriting all this.
Are we going to keep paying people to perfect the mimicry of authenticity, or will we demand platforms and investors stop profiting from decay?