“Slop” is Merriam-Webster’s 2025 Word of the Year:
We define slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” … The flood of slop in 2025 included absurd videos, off-kilter advertising images, cheesy propaganda, fake news that looks pretty real, junky AI-written books, “workslop” reports that waste coworkers’ time… and lots of talking cats. People found it annoying, and people ate it up. … “AI Slop is Everywhere,” warned The Wall Street Journal, while admitting to enjoying some of those cats.
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:
More experimentation. It can be hard to predict how good or great a piece of writing, art, music or video is going to be. Major Hollywood pictures can be disliked by audiences, critics, or both; books often fail to make money or even pay out their advances. Conversely, sometimes an unknown creator comes out with a work that is initially ignored but goes on to fame and/or fortune. Lowering the bar for creation allows for more experiments, more chances to create something high-quality.
Removal of the gatekeepers. If it’s hard to predict or evaluate what is good, who decides? Editors, producers, etc., who act as gatekeepers to the means of production and distribution. But gatekeepers are imperfect predictors, and they have blind spots. Harry Potter was rejected by twelve publishers before finding one that would take it: how many potentially great books never found that one editor to champion them, and never saw the light of day? Today there are far fewer gatekeepers for writing or podcasting, but they still exist in music and movies; AI will gradually remove these.
More chance for people to make a start. E.g., there are many good bloggers who never would have gotten started if they had to first find a job as a journalist.
More runway for works to find their audience. My writing had about 50 subscribers for the first two and a half years (now well over 50,000). Dwarkesh Patel was “was 2 months away from quitting the podcast for 2 years” before becoming a rocket-ship success. Lowering the cost of production allows these experiments to be incubated for years, kept alive by love and sweat, until they evolve into a more valuable form or catch their break.
More content for niche audiences. When content is expensive, it has to serve a large audience, and everything converges on bland mainstream taste. When the only significant cost is one creator’s time, it only has to find 1,000 True Fans, and there is much more room for a broad and varied menu to serve many different palates.
More diversity of content and format. When content is expensive, and gate-kept, it becomes the work of Trained Professionals, who are Serious People, and it should follow Formal Conventions. No serious magazine editor would approve a column that ranges widely across psychiatry, philosophy, politics, science, and epistemology, covering everything from book reviews to academic papers to online controversies. But that’s Scott Alexander, and he’s one of the best and most successful writers of our generation.
Freedom from the tyranny of finance. When content is expensive, it becomes the domain of large corporations, who have a duty to their shareholders and who frequently succumb to the ruthless logic of financial returns. Hollywood today has found the safest returns in sequels, remakes, and the endless continuation of franchises such as Star Wars or the MCU. Low costs give you more ability to work for the love of the craft and for the sake of the art.
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.
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?
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.