There is a particular kind of ambition that reveals itself only in its absence. Roku, the streaming platform that has built its reputation on the promise that there is a dedicated channel for every conceivable human appetite — Little House on the Prairie, Duck Dynasty, even unbroken local news from Wisconsin — has now extended that promise into stranger territory. Last week, the company quietly launched Fairground AI Creator TV, billed as the world's first free, fully AI-generated streaming channel, drawing its content from approximately 100 artificial-intelligence creators scattered across the globe. The early notices were not encouraging.

The Verge reached for the image of eating from a trough; Futurism, with a little less restraint, described the output as "bottom-of-the-barrel slop." These verdicts, it turns out, are not unfair. A journalist who spent several hours with the channel — driven, by his own admission, more by self-reproach than professional duty — reported a viewing experience that resembled less a television schedule than a fever dream assembled by an algorithm with no governing aesthetic. A jarring, high-frequency anime dissolved, without ceremony, into a sombre German-language short about Nazi bureaucracy, which was itself followed by something that appeared to be a gladiatorial entertainment of uncertain purpose.

And yet the channel's very awfulness illuminates something that television executives are unlikely to ignore for long. When a single episode of Stranger Things costs tens of millions of dollars to produce, the mathematics of cheap, inexhaustible AI content become, for certain boardrooms, genuinely seductive. You do not need a breakout hit; you need only enough insomniac viewers at three in the morning to nudge the revenue needle.