Scroll through social media these days and you’ll likely sense something is…off. Images look a bit too polished — glossy, surreal, almost cartoonish. Videos contain bizarre compositions of surreal visuals and awkward narration, often lacking any clear objective or connection to reality. And the comment sections are clogged with vague, nonsensical reactions.
What Is AI Slop?
AI slop is a term used to describe the low-quality, AI-generated content that’s rapidly spreading across social media and other platforms. Ranging from absurd political parodies to aesthetically pleasing imagery, AI slop is cheap, fast and designed to make you click on it.
Welcome to the world of AI slop: low-quality, artificially generated content created not to inform or inspire, but to maximize screen time. From images of Christ-like potatoes to popular songs remixed with cat meows, the sheer volume and absurdity of this stuff is hard to overstate. Often created by low-wage workers looking to cash in on clicks, AI slop is cheap, fast and highly optimized for engagement — and it’s seeping into virtually every corner of the internet.
This wave of slop is rising alongside the evolving sophistication of generative AI. As the tech improves, it’s able to churn out text, images, videos and even music that look and sound human-made, making it easier than ever to saturate online spaces with hollow, imitation content. And platforms don’t seem to care, so long as it performs well. The result is a digital environment where low-effort, high-volume junk is getting harder to spot — and even harder to avoid.
What Is AI Slop?
AI slop — often simply referred to as “slop” — refers to cheap, mass-produced content generated by artificial intelligence. Created primarily to garner clicks and comments, AI slop often lacks any real substance, validity or even coherence. But because it’s so good at keeping users scrolling, social media platforms have little incentive to slow it down.
For the platforms on which it is posted, AI slop is just as valuable as any other content, sometimes even more so. To them, content is content — the cheaper and less labor-intensive it is, the better. No matter the quality or substance, it fills feeds, boosts engagement and keeps ad revenue rolling in. That’s why companies like Meta YouTube and X are investing so heavily in generative AI, making it easier than ever to create, share and amplify slop.
The consequences for users are subtle, but insidious. AI slop blurs the lines between fact and fiction, supplanting deeper, more thoughtful posts with shallow distractions that lead to a kind of digital numbness, where scrolling feels empty, yet irresistible. And as the algorithms get better at immersing us in content we’re more likely to engage with, our feeds run the risk of becoming hyper-personalized echo chambers, filled with AI-generated rubbish that reflects our beliefs rather than reality.
Where Does AI Slop Come From?
AI slop can come from anywhere, but it is often created by low-wage workers in developing countries looking to earn a quick buck. These workers prompt generative AI tools to churn out massive volumes of content at once, often with no regard for quality or originality. With just a few keystrokes, they can automatically unleash a torrent of cheap, clickable material designed to rack up views, likes and shares.
While these tools are built to mimic human-made content, their outputs tend to be flawed or even incoherent. Even so, AI slop continues to spread across the internet. Google has implemented some tools to catch the worst of it, but it does not appear to penalize AI-generated content overall. And although platforms like Facebook, TikTok and YouTube now require AI content to be labeled, their algorithms are primarily designed to reward virality — regardless of whether the material was made by a person or a machine.
Examples of AI Slop
AI slop lives on the internet, especially social media platforms. There are also hundreds of junk websites filled with AI-generated articles, many of which are attracting real, paid advertisers.
It would be impossible to go over all the instances of AI slop — there are simply too many — but here are some of the most familiar ones.
Bizarre Visuals
Buff, anthropomorphic cats rescuing kittens from buff, anthropomorphic sharks. Cats morphed with fruit. Babies with various ailments holding cardboard signs that say it’s their birthday. Surreal, glitchy illustrations of U.S. soldiers styled to look like vintage political cartoons. Scantily clad flight attendants worshipping Jesus Christ. Jesus in a hospital bed — sometimes appearing to have just given birth. Jesus boxing the devil. Jesus as a giant shrimp. Jesus surrounded by cats, babies, soldiers and, yes, more flight attendants.
These are just a few of the bizarre visuals you’re likely to find gracing your social media feeds these days. They are often captioned with phrases like: “Why don’t pictures like this ever trend?” and “You will never regret liking this photo,” or just a ton of unrelated hashtags. This particular brand of slop is common because algorithms think this is what most effectively grabs our attention — and they’re not exactly wrong. Some of these posts have racked up thousands of likes and comments.
Political Parodies
Jesus isn’t the only recurring character in the world of AI slop, political figures are frequent subjects too. This was especially true in the lead up to the U.S. presidential election in 2024, where both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump starred in their fair share of AI-generated nonsense — some of which was even amplified by Trump himself. On TikTok, world leaders have been reimagined as prisoners, fashion models, giants and super buff giants. And AI renderings of Vice President JD Vance as everything from a chubby Bob Ross to a pinwheel hat-wearing toddler have gone mega viral.
Political Propaganda
Some politicians have even started using AI slop to push their agendas — especially those on the right. After Hurricane Helene, several Republicans circulated a fake image of a crying young girl clutching a puppy in a canoe, blaming President Biden’s failure to respond to the flooding. Meanwhile, Trump posted several AI-generated images on Truth Social of “Swifties for Trump” t-shirts and even a photo of Taylor Swift herself endorsing his 2024 presidential campaign. Upon his reelection, Trump also shared an AI-generated video depicting the Gaza Strip as a luxury resort.
Right-Wing Fantasies
Another growing genre of AI slop is far-right political fantasy. There are entire YouTube videos spinning up scenarios in which Trump allies triumph against all manner of villains, from God-hating judges to woke celebrities. On social media, neofascist accounts share AI-generated images of white, blonde, traditional families as aspirational models of the future. And timelines are awash with fake imagery of so-called “tradwives” — beautiful, supplicant homemakers packaged as a nostalgic return to an imaginary past.
Aesthetically Pleasing Images
AI slop can also serve as a sort of aesthetic escapism to soothe and distract viewers from the chaos of the world. Think perfectly decorated apartments bathed in golden-hour light, cozy cabins in snow-dusted forests or artfully plated meals that look almost too perfect to eat. These images dominate platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, often linking back to AI-powered content farms posing as lifestyle or wellness blogs in an effort to cash in on lucrative display ads.
Why Is AI Slop a Problem?
Although AI slop might seem silly and harmless at first glance, it’s creating real problems that are getting harder to ignore.
It Distorts Our Sense of Reality
AI slop isn’t just crappy content — in some cases, it’s distorting how we understand the world. Authentic journalism, creative expression and meaningful storytelling is getting buried beneath a nonstop stream of AI-generated clickbait that is purposefully deceptive at its worst and utterly useless at its best. Even serious global events like war, political unrest and natural disasters can be reduced to synthetic rage-bait, scams and memes.
This distortion carries real consequences. With social media platforms often rewarding engagement above all else, important issues are stripped of their context and presented in formats designed more to provoke than inform. Over time, the fear is that this will foster a kind of passive detachment, where our brains are so rotted we won’t recognize what’s real anymore — or even care.
It Fuels Disinformation
AI slop is a powerful delivery system for disinformation. Because this content can be produced so quickly, cheaply and at scale, it’s a perfect tool for those who want to spread lies without any consequences. It’s already playing a role in elections and political propaganda campaigns.
The more realistic it becomes, the more dangerous it will get. Not long ago, AI-generated content was fairly easy to spot — too many fingers, soulless eyes, robotic speech. But those tells are rapidly disappearing. Today, AI can make hyper-realistic images, lifelike deepfake videos and even entire podcast episodes that sound convincingly human.
The concern isn’t just about fake articles or doctored pictures anymore. It’s that nearly every format — audio, video, text, imagery — can now be plausibly fabricated, making it harder for even the most discerning user to separate fact from fiction. When used effectively, AI slop could completely erode trust and manipulate public opinion — not with one big lie, but with a deluge of small, semi-believable ones.
It Hurts Real People
In addition to crowding out real creators and journalists, AI slop poses a more acute danger to humans: It can damage reputations with smear campaigns and invasive personal attacks that seep out of social media and into the real world.
Take, for example, the now-viral (and entirely fake) video that accused a real college student of cheating on her boyfriend with his father. Although the information was completely fabricated using generative AI, it spread wildly across social media and was believed by many — including celebrities, who spread the lie even more. The girl has since become a top trending topic on X and her likeness was even turned into a memecoin without her consent. She claims to have received thousands of harassing calls and messages to take her own life, and is now pursuing legal action.
Generative AI is also fueling a rise in nonconsensual creation of deepfake pornography. Although U.S. law prohibits the unauthorized dissemination of sexually explicit videos and images, law enforcement agencies have struggled to keep pace with AI’s capabilities. The U.S. Senate has unanimously passed a bill that allows people portrayed in this material to sue its creators, and is working to pass another bill criminalizing nonconsensual AI-generated porn.
Still — like all the other slop — this stuff is getting easier to make and harder to spot. With just a few prompts, bad actors can generate convincing video, audio and images of anyone doing or saying anything. And by the time the truth catches up, the damage is often already done.
It Could Kill the Internet
Perhaps the most concerning part of this whole phenomenon is its scale. AI slop isn’t simply trickling into our feeds, it’s flooding them. And human-made content — which requires time, creativity and labor to produce — simply can’t keep up. Eventually, there could come a time when everything we see on social media (and maybe even the entire internet) has been created by AI bots.
That’s not to say the web is a total wasteland — at least not yet. Platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram pump out vast amounts of authentic content every day, as do news sites, blogs and forums. But there’s no denying our digital landscape has shifted away from its original design, becoming more commercialized and algorithmically driven.
To keep delivering real impressions to advertisers, search engines prioritize whatever content grabs human attention, even if that means surfacing AI-generated junk over quality information. Recommendation engines feed us what they think we’ll click on, not what is useful, true or important. And all the while social media is filling up with not just slop, but actual virtual influencers, who are cheaper and easier to manage than real people.
At a certain point, the internet might become so saturated with synthetic crap that it stops being worth looking at altogether.
Combatting AI Slop
Combatting AI slop starts with being a more intentional internet user. Follow and support real creators, seek out trusted news sources and pay attention to the quality of the content you consume — distorted visuals, clickbait-y copy and robotic narration are common red flags. And be mindful of what you share — this stuff only spreads if you engage with and distribute it.
Most importantly: Practice critical thinking. AI slop thrives in mindless scrolling, and is designed to trigger quick emotional reactions — outrage, fear, amusement, disgust, sadness. Slow down, ask questions and consider the source. Who made this? Why does it exist? In an ecosystem inundated with synthetic noise, skepticism and thoughtfulness can be powerful tools.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is all AI-generated content considered slop?
Not necessarily. AI slop typically refers to low-quality, mass produced content. It’s often absurd, clickbait-y, glitchy and riddled with errors. But not all AI-generated work falls into that category. In fact, some of this material is considered to be works of art — going on to win contests, play film festivals and sell for significant sums of money. This content likely isn’t what people are referring to when they discuss AI slop.
What is an example of AI slop?
One of the most infamous examples of AI slop is “Shrimp Jesus” — a series of AI-generated images featuring a Christ-like figure fused with shrimp and other crustaceans. Jesus Christ is a frequent subject of AI slop in general, often appearing alongside babies, kittens, flight attendants and soldiers.
How do I recognize AI slop?
To some extent, you just know AI slop when you see it. It’s often cartoonish, surreal and riddled with strange glitches and errors. The narratives and visuals tend to be clickbait-y, designed to provoke quick emotional reactions. Many sites now require creators to label their AI-generated content, but if you’re unsure, try using an AI detection tool. That said, their accuracy can be pretty hit or miss.
How do I avoid AI slop?
The short answer is: It’s hard. And if you spend a lot of time on social media, it’s probably impossible. You can install browser extensions to try filtering out AI content, and some have even started building their own AI slop blockers. But, for now, your best bet at avoiding it is to cut down on your screen time. Even then, some slop is bound to slip through.
