AI slop is killing the internet

It's not just you. Social media these days feels like a big trough of AI slop. It's just everywhere

Swipe through your For You page, your reels, your timeline, and you'll see slop on slop

junk, garbage, a big old pile of aimless goop. My name is Tim Marson. I write about digital culture

which means I spent a lot of time thinking about how AI is shaping the internet. And to be clear

we do have better data on the amount of slop out there than a big old pile

A study from the SEO firm Graphite, for instance, found that more than half the new articles published online are AI-generated

And video platform Kapwing found that roughly one in five YouTube shorts were slop, and that slop channels had racked up some 63 billion views on YouTube

There's no exact way to know how much slop is out there because, well, your mileage may vary when defining what slop even is

But to me, it's a you-know-it-when-you-see-it kind of deal. and technologist Adam Nemeroff defines it as a low to mid-quality content, video, images, audio

text, or a mix created with AI tools, often with little regard for accuracy. And that seems as good

a definition as any. You've seen this stuff. It's the fake rabbits caught bouncing on a trampoline

the emotional support kangaroo, ticket and paw, mind you, boarding a plane, the floating backhoe

cleaning barnacles off a whale. Yes, there's so much slop that animal slop is a genre in and of

Aiden Walker, an internet cultural researcher, told me that the average user probably sees slop reels every time they open an app

And I believe him. It certainly feels that way to me and I actively avoid anything AI generated

So why are we seeing all this slop The TLDR is easy as hell to make and spread AI video generators especially have gotten so good over the last year You could have a bot spit something out in a few seconds

and it looks pretty good. Posting that slop is low effort and low risk, but it carries the

potential to bring the person who posted it a ton of views should something hit. Often this stuff is

posted by people hustling to make a dollar, maybe in parts of the world where a dollar goes further

And not to knock the hustle, we've all got bills to pay, but we should be a little pissed that slop

is worming its way into our feeds. At the risk of sounding like a back in my day boomer

remember when the internet was fun or at least had the potential to be fun

Remember when you could actually connect with people? I wrote a whole story about married couples

who met on Twitter. Yes, love on Twitter. That's a distant past

Post on X now and you probably have people replying who are bots programmed to suck up to Elon Musk

And please don't marry one of those bots. I know we're all dead-eyed and cold-hearted

at this point, but we should be upset that our online diet is being force-fed inhuman, barely

enjoyable junk. You see, slop is just shiny enough to steal a moment of your time while remaining

incapable of being genuinely interesting. It's commodity, not craft. At best, it's junk food

flashy, empty calories, and at worst, it's dangerous misinformation or faked footage

It's a clearly fake video of a politician that your grandmother believes or offensive

sexual material of celebs. Remember those explicit fake images of Taylor Swift that flooded the

internet? AI Slop shoves Flotsam into a vast sea of content. Soon enough, you can't find anything

real, interesting, or informative. And unfortunately, Slop isn't going anywhere. At least not while AI

is the everything to the world economy. So careful scrolling out there