Viral Covid AI Post Comes From Guy Pushing Ugly AI Game Slop

A post about AI blew up this week. Like, big time. How do I know? Even my dad was sending me emails about it. This was no ordinary viral AI stunt. This was mid-2010s Buzzfeed-exploding-watermelon-on-Facebook levels of online mindshare. A big part of the professional mainstream media ecosystem has been freaking out about this post ever since. So my brain did a mini-Tim and Eric Awesome Show supernova when I discovered that the author of this viral AI post was the same guy who tried to get everyone hyped about a genAI Tom Clancy slop fever dream game last year.

The post in question was titled “Something Big Is Happening.” It got over 100k likes and 75 million impressions according to X’s totally accurate engagement trackers. It was written by AI with the help of Matt Shumer, a guy online behind totally-not-made-up companies like the “direct to consumer sports lifestyle brand” FURI, “groundbreaking medical virtual reality” healthcare provider Visos, and the “applied AI company building the most advanced autocomplete tools in the world” using other companies’ technology, called OthersideAI.

“Think back to February 2020,” begins Shumer’s viral AI post. “If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren’t paying close attention.” It proceeds to talk about how most people were completely caught off-guard by the once-in-a-century pandemic. Fools! It proceeds to argue that a great many are similarly unprepared for what’s happening with the rapid pace of advancing AI tech.

https://t.co/7CXcLtc0GC pic.twitter.com/KxQSoOZecL

— Megan Fritts (@freganmitts) February 11, 2026

It starts by talking about AI replacing coders and ends with a thought experiment about new countries appearing overnight in which everyone is smarter than a Nobel Laureate. The vibe is somewhere between the existential panic of Ebenezer Scrooge being shown his grave by the Ghost of Christmas Future and a frantic, smiling Ron Popeil trying to sell rotisserie ovens inside a hen house. Don’t get left behind! Renounce your AI skepticism before it’s too late! Become a Nobel Laureate for just four easy payments of $29.95 a month!

This broke a lot of people’s brains. Fights broke out across social media about how journalists need to take off their Luddite blinders and quit ragging on genAI all the time. “AI CEO warns AI’s disruption will be ‘much bigger’ than COVID,” declared Business Insider. “AI insiders are sounding the alarm,” trumpeted Axios. “The biggest talk among the AI crowd Wednesday was entrepreneur Matt Shumer’s post comparing this moment to the eve of the pandemic,” it reported. “It went mega-viral, gathering 56 million views in 36 hours, as he laid out the risks of AI fundamentally reshaping our jobs and lives.”

Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei sounded his own alarm with a double siren emoji. “In 30 years of journalism, I’ve never witnessed a bigger gap between the most consequential story – insane AI advancements and investment – and Washington and mainstream media attention…shocking # of people think AI is clunky AI of mid-2025,” he wrote on X. All of this explosive anxiety unleashed by what was essentially one of those mid-aughts chain letter emails your aunt whom you hadn’t spoken to in years used to flood your inbox with.

AI games are going to be amazing

(sound on) pic.twitter.com/66aOdWJr4Y

— Matt Shumer (@mattshumer_) October 23, 2025

Clearly, all of these people were unfamiliar with Shumer’s past work, but we at Kotaku covered it last October: an AI video game prototype trained on nightmare fuel. “AI games are going to be amazing (sound on),” he posted on October 23. What the footage showed was an on-rails shooter in which everything from the bullets to the enemies flickered in and around the logic of physics and linear time. The main gimmick is that “the game” would pause at discrete points to let you choose a prompt, and then immediately hallucinate a new section of melting 720p PS4 footage for “players” to ostensibly navigate through. It was evocative and terrifying and quickly ratio’d for sucking.

This is the guy who wants you to get your grandma a one-way ticket to Gas Town before her social security gets turned into crypto kitties by a rogue Anthropic vending machine AI or something. Could tens of thousands of retweets and millions of views really be wrong? Surely the self-perpetuating velocity of algorithmic engagement bait would never lead us astray, just as AI hyped by companies that might need a massive government bailout if their wildest promises don’t come true would never lie. That goes against the first rule of robotics or something, right?

The real reason AI slop man went viral is because secretly everyone is afraid that the ground is slipping out from under them, and they’ll once again be swept away by forces beyond their control. Will it be the hollowing out of democracy and the rise of authoritarian fascism? Will it be a complete reshaping of the economy by a chatbot that flirts with you while trying to upsell you on sponsored search results? Can AI secretly be the way you finally empower yourself to unyoke from a broken political system and a K-shaped economy? Or will it be the way tech giants cement their stranglehold over a weakened and demoralized populace?

“The only thing Big Tech is selling us is their own unprocessed trauma back to us,” Ryan Broderick writes at Garbage Day. “It’s not a revolution. It’s a comfort blanket for a managerial class that still can’t fathom that all their tech and wealth couldn’t protect them from the pandemic.” I think it’s something more self-interested: the fear of a platform shift that will destroy Silicon Valley’s current monopolies. Microsoft, Meta, and Google are so freaked out about becoming the next IBM or Yahoo that they are willing to bet the house on a future completely reshaped by technology they control because being wrong about that is cheaper than being the last to figure it out.

All I can say with confidence is that the AI slop game guy sure as shit has no special insight into what’s coming next.