What Is AI Slop and What Can You Do About It?

You may have heard the term “AI slop” in regard to the bizarre AI-generated images circulating on social media. You may have even seen these images yourself.

But what is AI slop? How do you recognize it, and what can you do about it?

What Is AI Slop?

“Slop” has become a term for any unwanted AI-generated content on the internet, the same way that "spam" has become synonymous with unwanted email. The term seems to be related to the “slop” that farmers feed to pigs. The term was first spotted on X, then elaborated on by open-source developer Simon Willison, who defines “slop” as “mindlessly generated and thrust upon someone who didn’t ask for it.”

Why Does AI Slop Exist?

The driving force behind AI slop is that it’s easy and cheap to generate AI images, and these things attract likes and comments. In other words, it’s engagement bait. AI slop is a lot like internet trolling: even if the content isn’t very good, what matters is that it gets people’s attention.

It's just engaging enough to grab some attention but not enough to warrant spending time really analyzing the content.

“AI slop” may be difficult to define, but you’ll know it when you see it. One X account showcases it as “Insane Facebook AI Slop.” Many of the posts on the account showcase tropes that have become associated with AI slop, including religious imagery, animals, soldiers, supposedly handcrafted objects, just plain bizarre images, and airline cabin crews.

AI slop also ties into the dead internet theory, which posits that most of the internet is now controlled by AI-powered bots and other AI tools that are all busy making a constant stream of content, drowning out human interactions. With many AI slop images generating thousands of likes and comments, it seems improbable that enough actual humans interact to reach such numbers. Still, with hordes of bots interacting, it's enough to propel this AI slop into the feeds of regular folks.

While social media networks should do more to counter AI slop and the resulting interactions, numerous rumors suggest they need bot activity to keep sites looking busy. As human users leave social media networks, company owners still need upward trending figures to maintain advertising income, and reams of bot activity are easy to blend in with regular user activity.

How Do You Recognize AI Slop?

AI slop might be obvious when you see it. Anyone who’s ever seen AI-generated imagery can spot it. Infamously, there are people with extra or missing fingers. AI image generators also seem to have difficulty rendering the nuances in human skin as of this writing. While there are tools to detect AI-generated images, a lot of AI slop is obvious to anyone with good old human eyeballs.

As mentioned earlier, AI slop tends to have a surreal look, depicting situations that would likely never happen in real life. The Washington Post compared the deluge of AI slop to the surrealist art movement. What would Salvador Dali have thought of generative AI?

The captions to these images are about as nonsensical. “Beautiful cabin crew," “Scarlett Johansson,” and "Why don't pictures like this ever trend?" have become memes and are frequently tagged in AI slop images.

What Can You Do About AI Slop?

Is there anything you can do about the seeming unending tide of AI slop? Unfortunately, options are limited, and the real onus is on social media networks to work harder to reduce such pointless content. But there are some small steps you can take to fight back against AI slop.

Many people on X and other social media platforms laugh at the bizarre AI art floating around the internet. Perhaps it’s a kind of lashing out a form of content they feel has been foisted upon them by major tech companies.

The popularity of social media highlighting AI slop is partially doing the work of pointing it out. Facebook’s audience may not be as familiar with AI-generated images. It would be helpful to point out that what people may see online might not represent the real world.

AI slop is a good reminder to everyone to be skeptical of what they see. Not everything is as obvious as “Shrimp Jesus,” so it’s important to remember that not everything you see on the internet is real.

And, of course, generative AI tools don’t seem to be going away. As with other technologies, you should use AI responsibly. Try not to contribute to the AI slop problem!

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