Slop, as I've generally seen it, refers specifically to AI-generated slop. You mention as much in your article. However, it seems like in your article, despite the fact that you do recognize that this term is generally used to refer to AI-generated slop at large, you seem to argue generally in favor of the concept that more people being able to produce more works will lead to good things. And I think that if those works were as they have been prior to, let's say, five years ago, when the influx of slop began, then I may agree with you. If there were simply easier ways for smaller creators to get seen or for people to get started with less resources, I would agree. But I don't think that what's happening is people being able to enter into things with less resources. I think what's happening is that larger amounts of attention are being able to be captured by lower amounts of effort. And that's the main worry, when people are being negative about slop: If it no longer requires more than a few minutes worth of effort to generate 100 videos that could potentially entertain 80 out of 100 people, that means that it's possible to make money and it's possible to capture attention with far higher efficiency and far lower effort overall as compared to pre-slop.
And that fact means that low effort content will be a much higher volume of what everyone sees on the Internet because it's able to capture attention on those feeds as well as or better than things that have more effort involved, A rising tide of slop raises all boats, possibly, yes, but most of those boats are slop.
Anecdotal evidence: I recently found a channel that generated about 10 videos per day, all within the theme of 'Simpsons episode recaps' using 'screenshots' of 'episodes' that were really just AI-generated images, and all of which more or less had to do with Elon Musk visiting Springfield, or another plot involving Elon Musk, or involving some sort of popular figure visiting Springfield.
Some of these videos were truly horrendous, hilariously bad or scary stuff, just absolutely incomprehensible imagery, nonsensical scripts that were obviously written by ChatGPT on a cheap plan, etc.,
But despite the fact that out of probably over a thousand videos that they had uploaded, almost all were doing extremely poorly, every once in a while one of the videos would hit thousands or hundreds of thousands of views, thus making it profitable for this person to spam YouTube with 15 slop videos a day on the off chance that they get one big hit, because the slop happened to be particularly engaging, or the script ended up being just coherent enough to seem plausible, and the images just convincing enough to seem real. I don't think that most people would believe that this sort of channel is beneficial to anyone, except for those who want cheap entertainment and don't care about the validity of what they're seeing, or how it was produced.
Also, generally on these platforms, everyone has to create a huge glut of content in the hopes that they get one or two big videos, because you could just get unlucky and not get more than a couple eyeballs on your stuff, even if you've made something truly good or worthwhile, and the algorithm particularly favors regular uploads. Which means that this increased volume from all the slop is making it harder for people to get seen, not easier, as you seem to suggest.
Thank you for covering the issue of optimizaton for virality in far more detail than my comment did! My worry is a different facet: what if such content distorts the users' brains with problematic results?
will, I believe, usher in a golden age of creativity and experimentation.
I think that it already has an entirely different result, but I can't find related research.
In the historical environment, memes in general would evolve by being retold from one individual to another or would be kept for a long time in the form of a book, painting, or object. Unlike short-form anecdotes and rumors, mere creation or retelling of a long-form story or a piece of art took a long time and reflection process. As a result, memetic environment historically required surviving information pieces to be remembered for a long time and deemed worthy of being transmitted, rather than superstimulating and viral.
A more modern environment also subjected memes and artifacts to censorship, and the rise of large-scale reproduction of newspapers or broadcasting mechanisms allowed the memetic environment to be influenced by companies (e.g. to advertise goods). While conservatives could also point out that companies have incentives to try and outcompete each other in misaligned stimuli like violence or eroticism, governments had the option to keep the competition in check.
As you suggest, it all changed with the rise of the Internet. The loss of barriers means that content is not just created by hordes of people or for less investment, but is optimized[1] for virality, including virality for niche readers, far stronger than historically.
Additionally, I expect that content optimized for virality influences the average readers' cultural taste and brings related changes in the reader's[2] capabilities or alignment with the potential to create feedback loops or outright echo chambers. One example is porn inducing erectile dysfunction or problems with relationships. Another is content explicitly called brainrot with corresponding results.
However, it could also be optimized by oversaturation of the market or as a result of the related genre becoming popular. I suspect that this happened with harem mangas, light novels and web novels.
This also includes influence on psyches of those who create similar content and fail to become famous, as happens with fan fiction writers.
“Slop” is Merriam-Webster’s 2025 Word of the Year:
Slop touches a nerve today. When Meta announced a product to create massive amounts of AI-generated short-form video, presumably with no goal other than entertainment to capture clicks and eyeballs, even my generally pro-technology circles exploded in disgust and outrage. Now we have education slop, math slop, drug discovery slop, longevity slop, and “urbanist slop.” Slop exemplifies everything wrong with the modern era; it signifies the gap—some would say the chasm—between what technology enables and what promotes human well-being.
I have no praise for slop itself, but we can be more sanguine about it if we see it as a byproduct of a bigger and more important trend.
People make things when the value of the thing exceeds the cost of creation. When the cost of creation in a medium is high, people are careful only to use it for high-value products. If a movie costs tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to make, you can’t afford to make a bad movie (or at least, not very many of them). You’re going to put a lot of effort into making it, and someone who holds the purse strings is going to have to decide if it’s good enough to fund.
Whenever the cost of creation in a medium falls, the volume of production greatly expands, but the average quality necessarily falls, because many of the new creations are low-quality. They are low-quality because they can be—because the cost of creation no longer prohibits them. And they are low-quality because when people aren’t spending much time or money to create something, they don’t feel the need to invest a lot in it. When you can quickly dash off a tweet, you don’t need to edit it or fact-check it, or even have correct spelling or grammar; when you can quickly create an AI illustration, you don’t need to hold it to high standards of composition, color, or even the right number of fingers. Hence slop.
The Internet lowered the cost of publishing to virtually zero, which enabled many low-quality blogs and other web sites. Social media made it trivial to put thoughts online, and made it much easier to find an audience, which enabled a vast amount more low-effort and low-quality posting. Now AI is arriving, and lowering the costs of creation itself, not just publication and audience-building. And it is enabling new and different forms of slop.
But along with slop, lower costs and barriers get us:
Slop is a byproduct of this overall process, the detritus that accompanies greatly expanded production. Slop is at best annoying and frustrating, and at worst a tool for scams or propaganda. But the overall process will, I believe, usher in a golden age of creativity and experimentation.
We don’t have to like slop, of course. We don’t even have to accept it. We can find ways to minimize it.
First, we need better tools for discovery. Just as the explosion of content on the Internet created a need for directories, search engines, and then social media, the next explosion of content will create a need for new ways to search, filter, etc. AI can help with this, if we apply the right design and product thinking. We can create a future equilibrium that is much better than the pre-AI world, where a thoughtful consumer is able to find more targeted, high-quality writing, video, etc. This is a call to action for the technologists who design and build our information supply chain.
But they key word above is “thoughtful.” The explosion of content raises the bar for everyone to be more conscious in your media consumption. The more stuff is out there, the more of it will be like junk food: enticing, tasty, but not nutritious and ultimately unfulfilling. We all need to be mindful in how we direct and spend our precious, limited attention in a world of increasingly unlimited choice. This is a call to action for every individual, and by extension to parents, teachers, psychologists, and moralists.