What is AI Slop?

“AI Slop” is a widely used, pejorative term for digital content created using generative artificial intelligence that is perceived as low-effort, low-quality, and produced in overwhelming volume.

It’s essentially the digital equivalent of spam or junk food—cheap to produce, lacking in real substance, and often flooding the internet to manipulate search results or social media engagement for profit.

Key Characteristics of AI Slop

AI slop can take many forms, including text, images, and video, and generally shares these traits:

• Low Effort & High Volume: It’s mass-produced quickly, often with minimal human review, editing, or quality control. The goal is quantity over quality.
• Lack of Depth or Originality: The content is generic, repetitive, and provides little unique insight or value. It’s often just a rehash of information found elsewhere.
• Inaccuracy or Nonsense: Due to the lack of human fact-checking, it frequently contains misinformation, “hallucinated” facts, or uncanny, nonsensical visuals (like images with distorted hands or bizarre object fusions).
• Engagement Bait: It is often designed purely to exploit platform algorithms, using sensationalism or formulaic phrasing to generate clicks, likes, and shares for ad revenue.
• Formulaic Writing: In text, it can exhibit predictable patterns, such as repetitive sentence structures, excessive use of qualifiers, or generic openings/closings that scream “I was written by an AI.”

Where You Might Encounter AI Slop

• Social Media: Mass-produced, uncanny images or videos, or low-effort memes designed for quick engagement.
• Search Engines: Articles that are keyword-stuffed, repetitive, and offer superficial information, often from content farms.
• E-commerce: Generic, unhelpful, or misleading product reviews and descriptions.

The concern with AI slop is that it dilutes the overall quality of information online, crowds out human-made content, and erodes public trust in digital media.