If the internet is a sea of content, AI slop is the flotsam and jetsam we're forced to swim around to make it from shore to shore. The garbage content is so ubiquitous that Merriam-Webster chose "Slop" as its 2025 Word of the Year, describing it as "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence."
You know what they're talking about, right? We have at our fingertips a growing array of chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Sora, and untold others that, with a little more than a prompt, let us create reams of content, everything from photos and videos to articles, research documents, presentations, and even podcasts.
Some of it is, arguably, wonderful. AI's gift is its ability to find meaning in vast swaths of data. It can go deep, it can go wide, and unearth valuable insights. It can take pages and pages of research and pull it into a usable report. AI can remove unwanted people and debris from a photo or even add things that didn't exist in the original pic.
We use AI to create "art" and, more recently, videos. The latter is built by the truckload in the new Sora app from OpenAI. I admit, I'm as guilty as the next person. Sora is a highly addictive app that makes it easy to generate, say, a video of a gorilla performing dentistry on me, or me chatting with a giant Santa Claus. These and other AI-generated videos are a near-perfect example of AI slop.
It's more than that, though. AI slop is so pervasive that we can scarcely recognize it. It's infecting reporting, customer service, advertising, and commercials (though, at this point, I can still almost always identify the AI "actors").
What's worse is that many are failing to identify when they use AI to generate content. People instead treat it like salt, sprinkling it liberally throughout everything in their lives.
At least with salt, there is a way to identify just how much is in our food – we just read the ingredients.
Just imagine what an ingredients label would read like in today's content:
- Inspiration — 20%
- Effort — 8%
- AI — 70%
- Second looks — 2%
While they didn’t plan it, Oxford’s 2025 Word of the Year is Rage Bait, which it defines as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive.”
I can imagine that, as you scroll through upsetting news and content on social media, the more than occasional AI slop might make you feel a little ragey.
Too much, too soon
AI slop is such a strange tech phenomenon that I attribute in part to powerful, incredibly easy-to-use tools being handed to the masses long before anyone worked out the kinks. You can argue that artificial intelligence has been around for decades, but powerful, consumer-grade, generative AI is just a few years old, and it was handed to us long before anyone understood the implications.
I have no doubt that millions are using AI for real work and important solutions, but I think the vast majority see it as a plaything or as the answer to their innate laziness, and they are spitting out AI slop on an hourly basis.
Our rage is unlikely to diminish anytime soon. Some experts think roughly half of all we see online is AI-generated, and others predicted that by now, at least 90% of the Internet might be AI slop.
I don’t share that dystopian view, but the line between human-generated and AI-produced content will blur as we confront a sea of undifferentiated content, where human skill is irrevocably married to AI enhancement. One can hope that such content will be less slop-like (but may be more bland).
In the near future, I expect AI tools will be even more powerful and agentic, empowered to gather information and assets and automatically generate fresh content without human intervention. What percentage of that do you think will be more AI slop?
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