AI slop is low-quality content generated by artificial intelligence. And there is a lot of AI slop on the internet. Mashable's Tim Marcin explains how we got here.

Recent analyses highlight a significant rise in AI-generated content, often referred to as 'AI slop,' across social media and online platforms. Studies show that more than half of new online articles and a substantial portion of short-form videos are now created by AI, with some channels amassing billions of views.

Experts define 'slop' as low- to mid-quality content produced with little concern for accuracy, including fake videos and images. This trend is attributed to the ease and low cost of AI content creation, leading to concerns about misinformation, declining content quality, and the erosion of genuine online interactions.

AI slop 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 Marsden and 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 Nemiroff 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 Paul, 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 itself. Aidan 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 it's 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. Hosting 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. 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 fake 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.

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Breakdown