Roku's AI slop channel is worse than expected

Roku launched the Fairground AI Creator TV channel, the first free all-AI streaming channel featuring content from roughly 100 AI creators, and early reviews have been highly critical, with The Verge comparing it to eating from a trough and Futurism calling it 'bottom-of-the-barrel slop'. A Guardian writer who watched several hours found it 'categorically, catastrophically awful', citing glitches and a preponderance of witless sepia historical dramas, though it shows AI has improved since 2023.

The appeal of Roku https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jun/15/fox-roku-acquisition-deal 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 https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/jul/07/little-house-on-the-prairie-netflix-reboot-controversy ? There’s a channel for it. Just want to watch Duck Dynasty? There’s a channel for that too. Purely want to watch nothing but local news from Wisconsin? Guess what: there’s a channel for that too. 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. It was reported last week that Roku launched the Fairground AI Creator TV channel https://fairground.tv/ , the first free, all- AI https://www.theguardian.com/technology/artificialintelligenceai 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 https://www.theverge.com/entertainment/976939/roku-fairground-ai-fast-channel it to eating from a trough, while Futurism called it https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/roku-unleashes-24-7-ai-slop-channel “bottom-of-the-barrel slop”. In truth, you will not watch Fairground AI Creator TV, and that’s 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 https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/stranger-things , and you’ll soon understand why executives might find the prospect irresistible. In this landscape you don’t need breakout hits, just enough stoned and curious students at 3am to turn a profit. 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 https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/z4rsmbk , and everyone would have vomited themselves dry. Generally speaking, what Fairground has to offer is much better. However, it is still awful. Categorically, catastrophically awful. The channel doesn’t 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’d see at the fourth-best museum on a poorly planned family holiday. In fact, as an aside, there seems to be an awful lot of this. Switch on Fairground at any time of day and I’d 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’re facing. There is so much of it that it worries me about the future of the medium. The promise of AI https://www.theguardian.com/film/ai 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. There are still horrible glitches to navigate – stray mouths that don’t 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 – but these are becoming less and less frequent as the technology improves. The bad news about this is that you’re forced to concentrate on the storytelling ability of the people who made this. And you simply cannot. Because it – all of it, every last stinking second of every godawful film – 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’s attention. You may as well be watching a screensaver, a CD-Rom menu screen or a fridge. 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’t impossible to see it eventually developing the capacity to convincingly entertain. But on the basis of what I’ve seen, that day is still a long way off. At one point, the channel cut away to a commercial for Roku’s 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’t deserve to exist.