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

At the heart of the research is a critique of the dominant message that underpins most pornography education in schools: that porn is dangerous and must be avoided at all costs. This simple warning model, the study finds, bears little resemblance to the evidence emerging from youth sexuality research. Studies of how young people actually interact with sexual media suggest that many of them interpret such content critically, question its realism, and compare what they see online with their own experiences of relationships and intimacy. Far from absorbing sexual media unthinkingly, teenagers frequently approach it with scepticism, curiosity and a desire to talk about what it means. The problem, the researchers argue, is that the education system is not built to harness that critical instinct.

The mismatch between what policy prescribes and what young people experience creates a serious challenge for teachers on the front line. Current classroom approaches tend to rely on warnings, scripted lessons and moral messaging designed to prevent harm before it occurs. These methods are well-intentioned, and safeguarding remains an essential priority, but the study suggests they often have the unintended effect of closing down discussion rather than opening it up. When lessons present pornography solely as a threat to be avoided, students who have already encountered sexual content, which is nearly all of them, learn quickly that honest questions are unwelcome. The result is that young people are left to make sense of complex issues about sex, consent and relationships on their own, without adult guidance or structured support.

To reach these conclusions, the research team analysed current policy frameworks, with particular attention to the UK government’s Independent Pornography Review, and compared them against interdisciplinary research into young people’s experiences of sexual media. The methodology combined a critical policy analysis with a synthesis of existing studies covering youth engagement with pornography, media literacy and sex education. By mapping how educational responses are shaped at the policy level and then testing those responses against the accumulated evidence of what young people actually report, the team was able to identify precisely where the current system falls short and why repeated calls for caution-based teaching have not resolved the underlying tensions.

Dr Emily Setty, lead author of the study and Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Surrey, explained the central problem with prevailing assumptions. The way pornography is currently taught in many schools assumes that young people simply absorb what they see and are harmed by it, she noted, but in reality their experiences are far more varied. Many young people question what they see, recognise unrealistic portrayals and want space to talk about relationships, consent and ethics. When education shuts down those conversations, she warned, it risks leaving them to make sense of these issues alone, at precisely the moment in their lives when structured guidance could make the greatest difference.

As an alternative, the research proposes a new educational framework the authors call safe uncertainty. Rather than pretending that educators can eliminate risk or that simple prohibition will work, the approach encourages open, structured discussions about pornography that acknowledge its complexity while still maintaining clear safeguarding and ethical boundaries. The framing is deliberate: safe signals that protective boundaries remain firmly in place, while uncertainty admits that sexual media is a complicated phenomenon that cannot be reduced to a single warning. Under this model, teachers act as facilitators of critical inquiry rather than enforcers of moral messaging, guiding students through difficult questions in a managed and supportive environment.

In practical terms, the safe uncertainty model would transform what happens in the classroom. Instead of lessons built around warnings, teachers would guide students to critically explore how sexual media represents consent, power, gender and relationships. Lessons might include analysing media portrayals to identify unrealistic or harmful depictions, discussing ethical dilemmas raised by the production and distribution of sexual content, or comparing online representations with the realities of intimacy and communication in actual relationships. This kind of active, analytical engagement, the researchers argue, develops what is termed porn literacy, a specialised form of media literacy that allows young people to question the production, realism and ethics of sexual content rather than simply being told to avoid it.

Dr Setty emphasised that pornography should not be viewed in isolation, since it is only one part of a much broader landscape of sexual messaging that includes social media, television, advertising and peer culture. Focusing narrowly on porn, she cautioned, risks exaggerating its influence while ignoring the other powerful cultural forces that shape how young people understand relationships and sex. A young person navigating the digital world today encounters sexualised and gendered messaging across nearly every platform they use, and an education system that addresses only one slice of that landscape leaves students poorly equipped for the whole. The broader goal, she argued, should be to equip young people with critical thinking skills and ethical awareness so they can navigate a complex digital environment in which sexual content is increasingly visible and increasingly difficult to avoid.

Importantly, the researchers are not arguing that concerns about potential harm should be dismissed. Addressing potential harm remains essential, and the safe uncertainty framework is explicitly designed to operate within safeguarding structures, not against them. The distinction the study draws is between harm prevention as the sole purpose of education and harm awareness as one component of a richer critical curriculum. Rather than relying solely on warnings or prohibition, the authors contend, education should also develop young people’s ability to interpret media, reflect on their own relationships and engage in honest conversations about sex and consent. In a media environment where young people will almost certainly encounter sexual content regardless of what schools say, the question is not whether they will be exposed but whether they will be prepared.

The findings arrive at a moment of intense debate about relationships, sex and health education in England, with policymakers under pressure to respond to rapid changes in digital culture. By grounding its critique in both policy analysis and the lived experiences of young people, the study offers a concrete alternative for educators and officials willing to move beyond fear. The research suggests that the most effective protection schools can offer is not silence or alarm, but the confidence and critical capacity that come from honest, well-structured dialogue. If the goal of education is to prepare young people for the world as it actually exists, the authors conclude, then teaching them to think critically about sexual media, in all its complexity, is not a risk to be avoided but a responsibility to be embraced.

Subject of Research: Pornography education and youth media literacy in England

Article Title: Fear-based education around porn is failing young people, say researchers

Article References: Fear-based education around porn is failing young people, say researchers. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: pornography education, young people, media literacy, porn literacy, sex education, safe uncertainty, University of Surrey, safeguarding, consent, digital culture, Porn Studies journal, critical policy analysis