Drew Gooden

Drew Gooden (born 1993) is an American comedian and YouTuber from Florida who first went viral on Vine — his “road work ahead” clip remains one of the platform’s most-quoted jokes — before building a commentary channel with millions of subscribers. His deadpan takedowns of bad movies, internet grifts, and tech fads made him one of YouTube’s defining commentary voices.

“AI is ruining the internet”

In June 2024 Gooden published “AI is ruining the internet,” an hour-long essay arguing that search results, stock photography, YouTube itself, and social feeds were being flooded with low-effort AI-generated content — the phenomenon now widely called “slop.” He drew a line between creative software that assists the process and generative tools that replace it, arguing that generative AI “is only about the end product” and teaches you nothing about the process of making something.

The video became one of the year’s most-shared creator statements on generative AI, trending on YouTube and circulating widely among artists and musicians as an articulation of why prompting is not the same as making. Gooden returned to the subject at the start of 2025, announcing a follow-up video with the comment that “there’s more stuff to complain about.” His critique is aesthetic and cultural rather than doomer — he is less worried about superintelligence than about an internet drowning in machine-generated garbage.