The timing of the research could hardly have been more charged. In October 2025, Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter reported that AI had entered WWE’s creative process, and months later TKO Group Holdings President Mark Shapiro acknowledged that Chief Content Officer Paul Levesque, better known as Triple H, uses AI in storylines. WWE clarified that its current AI use is largely confined to video edits, highlight packages and audio noise reduction, but for fans who had spent years reading between the lines of every backstage leak, the distinction felt almost irrelevant. The genie, as the researchers put it, was already out of the bottle.

Professional wrestling occupies a unique position in this debate because it is arguably the most liminal genre in popular culture, neither pure sport nor pure theatre but a hybrid resting on a fragile contract known as kayfabe. Kayfabe is the sustained illusion that rivalries and victories are real, even when everyone knows they are scripted. It is not about deception but about collective buy-in. The study asks what happens when the presumed writer is no longer human but an algorithm trained on decades of television transcripts, and whether AI in effect turns heel by breaking wrestling’s oldest covenant.

Using netnography, a form of ethnographic research adapted for online communities, the authors analysed public discourse across three subreddits, r/SquaredCircle, r/WWE and the satirical r/SCJerk, over a ten-week period between November 2025 and May 2026. They gathered live event threads, conducted keyword searches for terms such as AI and ChatGPT, and applied snowball sampling until every identified topic reached saturation. Reflexive thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke’s six-phase procedure produced three dominant themes, each revealing a different strategy by which fans negotiate algorithmic authorship.

The first theme the researchers call the forensic gaze, a heightened form of textual and visual inspection in which fans evaluate content not by whether it advances a storyline but by whether a human created it at all. The phenomenon crystallised around the April 2026 NXT video package featuring Zaria, which fans overwhelmingly condemned for its AI-generated appearance, citing asynchronous mouth movement, missing background blur and a plastic sheen on skin textures. More than 150 separate comment threads debated the package, with side-by-side comparisons to older, human-made WWE videos serving both as evidence and as demonstrations of community authority. The gaze extended to language itself, with fans claiming they could identify machine-written promos by their symmetric sentences, absence of colloquialisms and lack of heat behind the words.

Yet the forensic gaze also uncovered an uncomfortable truth. A minority of fans confessed that formulaic human writing had become so predictable that they could not reliably distinguish it from machine output. As one commenter asked, would AI really be worse than the fifteenth identical cookie-cutter promo of the year? This liminal case, the authors argue, suggests that algorithmic kayfabe can taint the viewing experience retrospectively, raising the possibility that humans have already been performing something close to algorithmic work long before machines arrived to formalise it.

The second theme centres on affective rejection, condensed in the label fans gave to unwanted AI content: AI slop. The term carries theoretical weight beyond its insult value, connoting waste, matter out of place and something generated without intent, care or craft rather than created. Outrage spiked after the NXT video packages, and 62 mentions of AI slop appeared on r/SquaredCircle compared with 34 on r/WWE and only 12, mostly sarcastic, on r/SCJerk. The researchers connect this fury to the moral economy of creative labour, noting comments such as the observation that WWE will pay Roman Reigns twenty million dollars but will not pay a video editor sixty thousand. Fans, the study finds, have become political economists of culture, framing AI authorship not merely as poor output but as dispossession.

Beneath the anger lies what the authors identify as an ontological violation. Fans distinguished carefully between the first fake, the deliberate theatrical artifice of kayfabe in which they knowingly participate, and a second fake, an algorithmic simulation of that artistry with no human intention behind it. One fan summarised it bluntly: the problem is not that wrestling is fake, which is obvious, but that when AI writes it, there is no human performance behind it at all. Drawing on Goffman’s frame analysis, the researchers describe this as a keying of a keying, a simulation of a simulation that audiences cannot trace and therefore cannot re-enter, rupturing the ritual contract between performer and spectator.

The third and most theoretically generative theme is parodic absorption, exemplified by r/SCJerk, where fans neither detect nor rage but instead swallow the AI threat whole through elaborate comedy. Users crafted a fictional AI-written return storyline for Bobby Lashley obsessed with Japanese culture, an absurd promo that mocked the real AI’s ignorance of wrestling continuity while exceeding its failures with deliberate ridiculousness. By producing funnier AI promos than the machines themselves, fans affirmed their own creative agency, and the community’s memes, such as the phrase AI is the new authority, allowed members to engage with the technology through strategic ambiguity, never committing to acceptance or rejection. The researchers call this an anti-affordance, a community-enforced discursive constraint that channels suspicion into irony, and they describe humour here as grassroots ontological repair, a communal mechanism for managing anxiety about a future no individual fan can control.

The study’s culminating contribution is the concept of dialectical algorithmic kayfabe. Rather than a single rupture in wrestling’s ritual contract, the authors argue that algorithmic kayfabe unfolds as an ongoing oscillation between detection, outrage and ironic repair, moments that coexist across platforms and can even be experienced by the same fan in the same evening. The framework extends affordance theory by showing that platform norms shape not just how fans speak but which emotions are legally acceptable in each space, and it advances Foucault’s author function by revealing its forensic side, in which fans deny authorship to any text lacking traces of human labour. As the researchers conclude, machines may increasingly help produce wrestling’s stories, but they hold no jurisdiction over togetherness, the collective performance of fandom that remains stubbornly, defiantly human.

Subject of Research: How WWE fans on Reddit perceive and negotiate AI-generated or AI-assisted wrestling storytelling on streaming platforms

Article Title: A netnography of WWE fans grappling with AI storytelling on streaming platforms

Article References: Pandey, S., & Roy, A. (2026). A netnography of WWE fans grappling with AI storytelling on streaming platforms. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 249. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00597-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00597-y

Keywords: WWE, artificial intelligence, netnography, fandom, streaming platforms, kayfabe, authenticity, Reddit, AI slop, algorithmic kayfabe, creative labour, digital culture