"AI slop", often simply "slop", is a derogatory term for low-quality media, including writing and images, made using

generative artificial intelligence Generative artificial intelligence (generative AI, GenAI, or GAI) is a subset of artificial intelligence that uses generative models to produce text, images, videos, or other forms of data. These models machine learning, learn the underlying p ...

technology. Coined in the 2020s, the term has a derogatory connotation akin to " spam". It has been variously defined as "digital clutter", "filler content produced by AI tools that prioritize speed and quantity over substance and quality", and "shoddy or unwanted AI content in social media, art, books and, increasingly, in search results". Jonathan Gilmore, Professor of Philosophy at the

City University of New York The City University of New York ( CUNY; , ) is the public university system of New York City. It is the largest urban university system in the United States, comprising 25 campuses: eleven senior colleges, seven community colleges and seven pr ...

, describes the "incredibly banal, realistic style" of AI slop as being "very easy to process".

Origin of the term

large language model A large language model (LLM) is a language model consisting of a neural network with many parameters (typically billions of weights or more), trained on large quantities of unlabelled text using self-supervised learning. LLMs emerged around 2018 an ...

s (LLMs) and image diffusion models accelerated the creation of high-volume but low-quality written content and images, discussion commenced for the appropriate term for the volume. Terms proposed included "AI garbage", "AI pollution", and "AI-generated dross". Early uses of the term "slop" as a descriptor for low-grade AI material apparently came in reaction to the release of AI image generators in 2022. Its early use has been noted among

4chan 4chan is an anonymous English-language imageboard website. Launched by Christopher "moot" Poole in October 2003, the site hosts boards dedicated to a wide variety of topics, from anime and manga to video games, cooking, weapons, television, ...

Hacker News Hacker News (sometimes abbreviated as HN) is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. It is run by the investment fund and startup incubator Y Combinator. In general, content that can be submitted is defined as "an ...

and

YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second most ...

commentators as a form of in-group

slang Slang is vocabulary (words, phrases, and usage (language), linguistic usages) of an informal register, common in spoken conversation but avoided in formal writing. It also sometimes refers to the language generally exclusive to the members of p ...

. The British computer-programmer

Simon Willison Simon Willison is a British programmer, co-founder of the social conference directory Lanyrd, and Director of Architecture at Eventbrite. Originating from the UK, he currently resides in San Francisco, California. Simon is a co-creator of the Dj ...

is credited for being an early champion of the term "slop" in the mainstream, which he did in May 2024 on his personal blog. However, he has said it was in use long before he began pushing for the term. The term gained increased popularity in second quarter 2024 in part because of

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

's use of its

Gemini Gemini may refer to: Space * Gemini (constellation), one of the constellations of the zodiac ** Gemini in Chinese astronomy * Project Gemini, the second U.S. crewed spaceflight program * Gemini Observatory, consisting of telescopes in the Northern ...

AI model to generate responses to search queries, and was widely used in media headlines by the fourth quarter of 2024. Research found that training LLMs on slop causes model collapse: a consistent decrease in the lexical, syntactic, and semantic diversity of the model outputs through successive iterations, notably remarkable for tasks demanding high levels of creativity.

On social media

AI-generated veteran birthday sign image

AI image and video slop proliferated on social media in part because it was revenue generating for its creators on

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin ...

and

TikTok TikTok, known in China as Douyin (), is a short-form video hosting service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from 15 seconds to 10 minutes. TikTok is an international version ...

. This incentivizes individuals from

developing Development or developing may refer to: Arts *Development hell, when a project is stuck in development *Filmmaking, development phase, including finance and budgeting *Development (music), the process thematic material is reshaped * Photograph ...

countries to create images that appeal to audiences in the United States which attract higher advertising rates. The journalist Jason Koebler speculated that the bizarre nature of some of the content may be due to the creators using Hindi, Urdu, and Vietnamese prompts (languages which are underrepresented in the model's

training data In machine learning, a common task is the study and construction of algorithms that can learn from and make predictions on data. Such algorithms function by making data-driven predictions or decisions, through building a mathematical model from ...

), or using erratic

speech-to-text Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the ma ...

methods to translate their intentions into English. Speaking to ''

New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States New York may also refer to: Film and television * '' ...

'' magazine, a Kenyan creator of slop images described giving

ChatGPT ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022. It is built on top of OpenAI's GPT-3 family of large language models, and is fine-tuned (an approach to transfer learning) with both supervised and ...

prompts such as "WRITE ME 10 PROMPT picture OF JESUS WHICH WILLING BRING HIGH ENGAGEMENT ON FACEBOOK", and then feeding those created prompts into a

text-to-image A text-to-image model is a machine learning model which takes as input a natural language description and produces an image matching that description. Such models began to be developed in the mid-2010s, as a result of advances in deep neural netwo ...

AI service such as

Midjourney Midjourney is an independent research lab that produces an artificial intelligence program under the same name that creates images from textual descriptions, similar to OpenAI's DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. It is speculated that the underlying t ...

In politics

In August 2024, ''

The Atlantic ''The Atlantic'' is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher. It features articles in the fields of politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science. It was founded in 1857 in Boston, ...

'' noted that AI slop was becoming associated with the political right in the United States, who were using it for

shitposting In Internet culture, shitposting, trashposting, or funposting is the act of using an Internet forum, online forum or social media page to post content that is Satire, satirical and of "aggressively, Irony, ironically, and Internet troll, trollis ...

and engagement farming on social media, the technology offering "cheap, fast, on-demand fodder for content". In the aftermath of

Hurricane Helene Hurricane Helene ( ) was a large and devastating tropical cyclone that caused widespread destruction and fatalities across the Southeastern United States in late September 2024. It was the strongest hurricane on record to strike the Big Bend ...

in the United States, members of the

Republican Party Republican Party is a name used by many political parties around the world, though the term most commonly refers to the United States' Republican Party. Republican Party may also refer to: Africa *Republican Party (Liberia) *Republican Party ...

circulated an AI-generated image of a young girl holding a puppy in a flood, and used it as evidence of the failure of President Joe Biden to respond to the disaster. Some, like

Amy Kremer Amy Kremer (born 1970 or 1971) is an American political activist known for her roles in the Tea Party movement and as a supporter of Donald Trump. She became involved in the Tea Party movement in 2009 and campaigned as part of the Tea Party E ...

, shared the image on social media even while acknowledging that it was not genuine.

In event listings

Fantastical promotional graphics for the 2024

Willy's Chocolate Experience Willy's Chocolate Experience was an unlicensed event based on ''Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'' that took place in Glasgow, Scotland, in February 2024. The event was promoted as an immersive and interactive family experience, illustrate ...

event, characterized as "AI-generated slop", misled audiences into attending an event that was held in a cheaply decorated warehouse. Tickets were marketed through

advertisements showing AI-generated imagery, with no genuine photographs of the venue. In October 2024, thousands of people were reported to have assembled for a non-existent Halloween parade in

Dublin Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of the Wicklow Mountains range. At the 2016 ...

as a result of a listing on an aggregation listings website, MySpiritHalloween.com, which used AI-generated content. The listing went viral on TikTok and

Instagram Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters and organized by hashtags and geographical tagging. Posts can ...

. While a similar parade had been held in

Galway Galway ( ; ga, Gaillimh, ) is a city in the West of Ireland, in the province of Connacht, which is the county town of County Galway. It lies on the River Corrib between Lough Corrib and Galway Bay, and is the sixth most populous city ...

, and Dublin had hosted parades in prior years, there was no parade in Dublin in 2024. One analyst characterized the website, which appeared to use AI-generated staff pictures, as likely using artificial intelligence "to create content quickly and cheaply where opportunities are found". The site's owner said that "We asked ChatGPT to write the article for us, but it wasn't ChatGPT by itself." In the past the site had removed non-existent events when contacted by their venues, but in the case of the Dublin parade the site owner said that "no one reported that this one wasn't going to happen". MySpiritHalloween.com updated their page to say that the parade had been "canceled" when they became aware of the issue.

In advertising

In November 2024,

Coca-Cola Coca-Cola, or Coke, is a carbonated soft drink manufactured by the Coca-Cola Company. Originally marketed as a temperance drink and intended as a patent medicine, it was invented in the late 19th century by John Stith Pemberton in Atla ...

used artificial intelligence to create three commercials as part of their annual holiday campaign. These videos were immediately met with negative reception from both casual viewers and artists, with animator

Alex Hirsch Alexander Robert Hirsch (born June 18, 1985) is an American voice actor, animator, writer, storyboard artist, and producer. He is the creator of the Disney Channel series '' Gravity Falls'', for which he provided the voices of Grunkle Stan, S ...

, creator of ''

Gravity Falls ''Gravity Falls'' is an American mystery comedy animated television series created by Alex Hirsch for Disney Channel and Disney XD. The series follows the adventures of Dipper Pines ( Jason Ritter) and his twin sister Mabel (Kristen Schaal ...

'', criticizing the company's decision to not employ human artists to create the commercial. In response to the negative feedback, the company defended their decision to use generative artificial intelligence stating that "Coca-Cola will always remain dedicated to creating the highest level of work at the intersection of human creativity and technology".

In books

Online booksellers and library vendors now have many titles that are written by AI and are not curated into collections by librarians. The digital media provider Hoopla, which supplies libraries with

ebooks An ebook (short for electronic book), also known as an e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. Alt ...

and downloadable content, has generative AI books with fictional authors and dubious quality, which cost libraries money when checked out by unsuspecting patrons.

References

External links

* {{Wiktionary-inline, slop 2020s neologisms 2020s slang Generative artificial intelligence Pejorative terms related to technology