After circling the perimeter for a few years, AI slop has finally come to Jonestown. As if the 918 individuals who perished on November 18, 1978, warranted further indignity.
Starting about April 19, YouTube has been inundated with brief, AI-generated videos summarizing Jonestown’s final day in lurid fashion. The shorts multiplied like rabbits throughout May. At least 143 permutations of it exist as of May 31.
I’ve spent the last few weeks watching the videos. An unpleasant experience if there ever was one. I honestly can’t recommend it. For a while there, I felt the effects of artificial intelligence deepening my organic stupidity. (That’s a bug, right? Not a feature.)
As a fellow inhabitant of the Jonestown vortex told me on discovering the shorts: “These would almost be laughable, if they weren’t so horrible and disrespectful and false and grotesque.”
The garish videos focus on a few recurrent elements: An audio recording of the deaths exists. The event was a mass murder and not a mass suicide. Jim Jones’s manipulative abilities knew no bounds and would make a comic book supervillain envious. Rep. Leo Ryan was a near-mythic hero, with the square jaw and youthful vigor of a Hollywood leading man. Maybe the CIA was involved in some nefarious way.
As you’d expect, the titles are culled from a shuffled deck of sensationalistic, clickbait adjectives. A sampling: “The Chilling Jonestown Death Tape That Recorded 918 Deaths in One Hour”, “The Horrifying Truth About Jonestown: It Wasn’t Suicide, It Was Murder”, “The Congressman Who Walked Into America’s Deadliest Mass Murder”, and “CIA Watched Jonestown Build Death Camp”. You get the idea.
Though published by hundreds of channels of various ages, they share characteristics and, in some cases, are identical. They average about one minute in length and feature flat narration in varying accents giving quick factoids that are kinda, sorta, almost right if you squint hard enough. (Surely no one expected AI to correct the misnomer that it was Kool-Aid rather than Flavor Aid used in the poisonous drink.) 
Some have imagery that could be briefly mistaken for photographs in that uncanny valley way, if you ignore the occasional extra hands of the people depicted or those drinking poison from the bottom of a glass. Most are animated in a range of diverse styles — Renaissance-era, Norman Rockwell-esque Americana, Pixar-aping CGI, fantasy, cartoon, comic book, anime. One even portrays babies being poisoned in vintage, 16-bit video game pixels. All are jittery and anxiety-inducing, the imagery trembling as though it was pumped full of caffeine or amphetamines.
Jonestown itself is usually depicted as a small, thatch-hut community surrounded by jungle. In some clips, it’s an American suburb seemingly air dropped onto a jungle-surrounded plateau; in others, it’s an unabashed prison camp. The AI incongruity we’ve come to expect often adds a church, community center, or modern hospital. Jonestown residents are bug-eyed and dripping in sweat, mouths agape and screaming. Members of Jonestown’s security force (or Red Brigade) are disproportionately Black, clad in military-style uniforms and toting machine guns. Some wear Nazi regalia and have vampire fangs, which is somewhat fitting as the narration erroneously states the guards hunted down and executed Jonestown residents who fled into the surrounding jungle to avoid being poisoned. 
Particularly tasteless — the word loses all meaning when discussing AI — is a cartoon image of a menacing face on a red plastic cup, poisoned punch splashed about it and surrounded by a shadowed mass of zombies. A few of the videos depict Jonestown’s end as being razed to the ground in an apocalyptic fire.
AI’s iteration of Jones typically portrays him wearing a suit and tie, appearing respectable if on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Not always, though, for in some of the increasingly outlandish videos, he’s clothed in attire suggesting the 19th Century or as far back as Classical Greece. In a few, he more closely resembles a beleaguered and disheveled David Koresh. At least one video gets it right that Jones died from a gunshot wound to his head rather than from cyanide, but immediately undercuts any points for accuracy by featuring an illustration of Jones still standing and raging with a bullet hole in his forehead. Weirdly, he has a mustache more often than he lacks it. I guess it’s hard to be a mustache-twirling villain without the mustache…
Perhaps most puzzling, for the sheer laziness and irony, is that AI’s versions of Jones run the racial gamut from White to Black, from vaguely Latino to ambiguously Asian. Whatever ethnic background you’re prejudiced against, AI has a Jim Jones bogeyman tailor-made just for you. If Jones were somehow able to comment on his public perception in 2026, I’d venture his vanity would be more offended over his image being used as racial fodder than he would be over his legacy as a deranged mass murderer.
This whole sad development was an inevitability, with the internet in general and YouTube specifically flooded in recent years with mindless, auto-generated content that is intended to…? What? I don’t know. Educate others? That thinnest of pretexts is hamstrung when the information offered has, at best, a 50-50 chance of being accurate. Maybe its purpose is to entertain? If that’s the case, even a cynic like me shudders to consider the indictment that levels at the viewing populace.
Stripping aside pro-AI propaganda, dictating we ignorant Luddites toe the line or fall behind, what is it really for? The unsubtle mission of AI is to give the wealthy access to talent and creativity, while removing access to wealth from the talented and creative. Its foundation is to enrich someone or something with minimal effort. Along with that is its solipsistic staple of disregarding whatever larger harm is done in the name of profit. Considering that, the most baffling aspect of the videos’ production emerges.
The majority of the channels that posted the shorts have very few subscribers, from zero to a few dozen, although a handful boast triple digits and go as high as 1,210. Many were created in the days immediately before posting its Jonestown video. Others launched more than a decade ago but had very little activity until recently. The videos themselves tend to get views in the single or low double digits, though a few tip into the hundreds. They do not feature ads. One of the first channels to share such a video — if not the first — launched in 2015 and posted no content (another nausea-inducing word) until September 2025. The few that garner commentary from YouTube visitors indicate the AI-tableaus aren’t being well received.
“For one that’s not Jim Jones,” reads one comment on that potential patient-zero video.
“There is so much incorrect in this video. Please take it down,” reads another.
“I’m a little,,, a lot offended by this. Jim Jones was not a man of color,” still another.
YouTube maintains it is “approaching AI responsibly.” Yeah. Sure. OK. I’ll take “Oxymorons” for $600, Alex.
“While we lean in to [sic] AI’s potential, we want to make sure we have the right protections and guardrails in place,” the company states. “We require that creators disclose when realistic content is made with altered or synthetic media, including Gen AI Labels may then appear within the video description information, and if content is related to sensitive topics like health, news, elections, or finance, we may also display a label on the video itself.”
While I’ve not watched every single one of these shorts, the ones I have do not feature disclaimers regarding their AI origins.
Publications like Forbes and 404 Media have been sounding the clarion call on AI’s infestation of YouTube. The latter in February 2025 published an exposé on a YouTube video titled “Husband’s Secret Gay Love Affair with Step Son Ends in Grisly Murder” about a homicide in Littleton, Colorado, amassing 2 million views. The video was one of about 150 entries on the channel True Crime Case Files.
Here’s the rub: the videos and the cases they detailed were entirely AI-generated.
Henry Larson, author of the 404 article, contacted the person who operated the channel, pseudonymously dubbed “Paul.” He defended his false creations by claiming they wouldn’t draw many viewers unless they were labeled as true. (Think how engrossing the Coen Brothers’ 1996 film Fargo is thanks to the title card asserting “This is a true story,” despite the plot being entirely fictitious.) Paul brushed aside criticism by referring to his channel’s content as “an absurdist art form.”
Larson reached out to YouTube with questions about the monetization of Paul’s videos and possible policy violations. YouTube terminated the channel for several violations of its Community Guidelines, spokesman Jack Malon told Larson.
I reached out to Malon with some questions of my own in hopes of tracking down the videos’ origins and how they’re being monetized, if they are. I also asked if the videos are concerning, as several feature animation of children consuming poison.
Malon did not provide answers before my deadline.
Forbes’ article, published days after 404’s, was direct and prescient with its title: “YouTube Is Flooded With AI Slop — And It Will Get Worse.”
Paul’s most popular video was “not an outlier,” wrote Forbes’ Dimitar “Mix” Mihov. “It’s merely another cancer cell swiftly spreading through YouTube’s system. The tumor in the platform’s blood is AI — and at this point, the damage might be irreversible.”
As the article relates, Google had just launched an upgraded Dream Screen, “an AI-powered YouTube feature that lets users generate backgrounds for Shorts with text prompts.”
Dina Berrada, the director of product, heralded Dream Screen’s arrival: “Need a specific scene but don’t have the right footage? Want to turn your imagination into reality and tell a unique story? Simply use a text prompt to generate a video clip that fits perfectly into your narrative, or create a whole new world of content. It’s that easy!”
With all this in mind, maybe it’s more surprising (sorry, “shocking” to be trending in AI’s hyperbolic lingo) that AI didn’t swallow and digest the story of Peoples Temple sooner. That’s not to say it hasn’t been nibbling at it in recent years.
In November 2023, MLive.com published a series of articles I wrote on obscure Peoples Temple member Shirlee A. Fields, her pharmacist husband, and their two children, all of whom died on November 18. The series’ installments dropped on separate days. Almost immediately after each one published, I noticed something equally confounding and infuriating: A European-based website was auto-publishing AI-altered versions of my articles, bearing another journalist’s byline and complete with AI-generated “photos” of a jungle settlement in charred ruins.
The website is now defunct, which is good, but it amounts to a Pyrrhic victory.
Dr. Rebecca Moore addressed this phenomenon and other instances of AI, in its infinite ignorance, churning out inaccurate depictions of Jonestown in an October 2024 piece. One of the most risible examples she found was an AI article that mistakenly described Chrissy Lampkin, the girlfriend of rapper Jim Jones, as the late wife of Peoples Temple’s Jim Jones. Elsewhere in the same piece, Lampkin was described as having survived the massacre by being in Georgetown.
Never mind that Lampkin was eight years old when Peoples Temple ended or that she is still alive. The pro-AI camp would have us keep the faith, that this was an example of the system working out its bugs. Yeah, sure. But what this example signifies is that AI won’t just contradict established facts. It will contradict itself, fashioning an ouroboros of misinformation and miseducation.
AI is learning, sure, but what is it learning? To dumb us down even further, to muddy the waters, disseminate confusion and be the final nail in the post-truth/alternative facts era? These videos’ proliferation all but guarantees undiscerning viewers will walk away with erroneous impressions of Peoples Temple and Jonestown’s historic importance. Can’t you already envision the vitriolic online arguments, wherein someone will insist Jones was a mustachioed, besuited Hispanic man whose machine gun-toting Nazi guards killed a derby hat-clad Leo Ryan?
These videos’ existence proves, as did Jonestown’s own downfall, that what takes years of effort and work to build can be torn asunder, rendered null in a flash.
While working on this piece, I took in a screening of the A24 horror film Backrooms. There’s a line delivered by the movie’s central character, describing the unreality of a convoluted liminal space presenting as a yellow-haze, fluorescent-humming office building: “Imagine describing a dog to someone who has never seen one before, and then asking them to draw it. It will look similar, but the devil is in the details…”
Is there a better description of AI?
(Editor’s note: An average of four “new” videos has emerged every day since this article was written.)
(Cole Waterman is a Michigan-based crime reporter with a long-held interest in Peoples Temple and Jonestown who has submitted numerous primary source transcripts from the FBI’s FOIA files to the site beginning in the fall of 2023. His complete collection of articles is here.)