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The worst of artificial intelligence slop has cluttered Google searches with recipes for glue-topped pizza, Amazon listings with sham biographies and Facebook feeds with images of Shrimp Jesus.
The digital sewage heap has sprawled over tech platforms, cheapening meaningful content and polluting the information ecosystem, as the advance of chatbots and video generators continues.
Spotify said it removed 75 million bulk uploads, duplicate songs and other “spammy” tracks last year – a sizable chunk of its total portfolio. LinkedIn said in July that “AI slop is a top priority for all of us” and developed a button for users to report it. Researchers from YouTube’s parent company, Google, described how a video service wiped 130,000 channels of low-quality content from its platform over six months.
All over the internet, tech companies are undertaking a generative waste detox, overwhelmed in many cases by the same slop first made possible by their own AI tools. Mobile messaging apps, restaurant review sites, scholarly archives and dating services are rooting out or downplaying junk generated by AI – many relying on the same technology to pull off the purge.
People are tiring of AI’s effect on the environment and its pressure on jobs and mental health. AI slop is just another “festering wound”, said Aidan Walker, a content creator and researcher studying online trends for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a global affairs think tank.
“Users have gradually gotten more and more upset about it,” he said. “The climate of opinion has now recognisably shifted, so these companies are finally confronting these problems.”
Generative AI can produce increasingly realistic images, audio and videos, but only some of it qualifies as slop. Tech companies are largely targeting the kind of low-grade clickbait that is easy to make, spread, consume and forget – the fast fashion edging out couture, the pink slime subsuming the steak.
Unchecked, the synthetic swamp online could “crowd out human creativity, corrode cultural value and destabilise public discourse”, European researchers wrote last year.
Slop has become so prevalent that dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster chose it as its word of the year in 2025. Deezer, a French streaming service, said earlier this year that nearly half the tracks updated to its system daily were artificially generated, and many of them were never heard by users. AI generates more than a third of what is uploaded to Apple Music.
Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, said late last year that it would soon “be more practical” to trace “real media than fake media”. His observation came not long after Meta, Instagram’s parent company, rolled out an all-AI video stream derided by many as a showcase for slop.
Many tech companies now trying to manage AI slop have enabled it. In July, Meta promised to support a European pact to make AI-generated content more identifiable via detection, labelling and tagging. That same month, the company also released an image generator that automatically opted in public Instagram accounts as a reference for the tool. (Meta removed the feature after three days of backlash.)
“AI slop is a double-edged sword in that a lot of these platforms experienced upticks in engagement as a result of it,” said Paul Shovlin, an expert in AI at Ohio University. “But then, it got to a point where it became a liability because there’s so much flotsam and jetsam that it’s now hard for users to find the kind of quality that they’re looking for.”
Google, for example, has gone all in on AI, linking its Gemini model to its email, maps and travel services and search. More than 20 per cent of the initial short videos on YouTube served to new users are AI-generated slop, according to an experiment conducted last year by Kapwing, an online video editor that is powered by AI.
One of the most popular YouTube slop channels, Kapwing estimated, earned $US4.25 million ($6 million) annually. (It has since been suspended from a YouTube monetisation program.) Neal Mohan, YouTube’s CEO, wrote on a blog post that “managing AI slop” was a top priority this year.