How we work

Rankings tell you who is big. They don't tell you how the work is made, or whether anyone else could make it. The only honest way to answer that is to make it ourselves — and publish the prompts, the retries, the cost, and the gap that's left.

1. The content is primarily AI-generated, and that's disclosed or verifiable.
2. The account has been active for at least 60 days, with a stable series or persona.
3. It has real reach, or it's clearly new in how it's made. Editor's picks say why.
4. There's something to learn from it — not templated mass production.
5. We exclude accounts that are mainly adult content, use a real person's likeness without consent, or impersonate real people.
6. A person reviews every pick and records the reason and date. Inclusion is never for sale.

Every replication looks at the creator on three levels:

• Account — the persona, the world, the series, the cadence, how it makes money.
• Video — one piece, beat by beat: the hook, the timing, the shots, the edit.
• Technique — one effect at a time, like lip sync or keeping a face consistent, with the exact recipe we used.

• Every number has a date and a source. Follower counts and views are snapshots; we say when we read them and where. Figures a company reports about itself are marked self-reported.
• Costs come from our generation log. Every model call we make is logged — failed ones included — with its price, time, and output.
• Hit rate is the share of reviewed generations we judged usable. A person makes that call, not a model.
• Unit cost is total spend divided by usable generations.
• Time is generation time plus the human time we log by hand.

When a creator or reliable reporting tells us how something was made, we mark it verified. When we're working it out from the footage, we mark it inferred and say so. Most of what we publish about other people's methods is inferred.

We replicate technique and structure, not identity. Our replications use our own characters, credit the original, link to it rather than rehosting it, and are labeled as AI-generated.

If we got something wrong — a number, a method, a credit — we fix the page and note the change at the bottom.