The year of “AI slop”
The internet has been overrun by AI content.
The weirdly glowing and inadvertently surreal airbrushed images, the generic and oddly formal sentences peppered with factual errors and distracting phrases like “as of my last knowledge update.”
So much of social media content these days has the unmistakable stench of “AI slop,” hastily spit out by image generators or chatbots to get a few likes.
And while the phenomenon might seem harmless or sometimes even charming, the AI slop takeover of the internet is crowding out real information and human perspectives.
Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Rebecca Jennings, a senior correspondent at Vox, about how AI slop is transforming social media. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Rebecca Jennings: So I first started seeing it on Twitter/X. It was pictures that looked like it could have been in Edinburgh. So this one in particular was, it was like a view out of a cafe window. And it was very like, moody, kind of rainy street with string lights atop and a church in the distance. It was very pretty. And then you kind of look at it for like one second longer, and you’re like, why is the table wet? And why is there, like, a big chunk of broccoli, maybe, in the tea cup? And what is that beige liquid in the milk jar? And why are there 4,000 kinds of bread on the table? It’s just like, very bizarre and kind of inexplicable. And in what world would that actually be a real photo? Even though when you first look at it, it’s like, oh, that looks really pretty.
Meghan McCarty Carino: You also write about things like say, you know, you’re a crocheter or a knitter looking for some inspiration. Or, when we were talking about this among the producers, one of our producers was getting married and looking for hairstyles on Pinterest and finding just all of these physically impossible AI hair style.
Jennings: Yeah, I think it’s easy to kind of look at this stuff and be like, oh, again, like, who cares if it’s just like a pretty photo of a little town that doesn’t actually exist? But I think it’s like, slop is kind of infecting areas where you really would want something useful to look at. For instance, knitting and crocheting patterns and sewing patterns are now being inundated with these patterns that don’t make sense or inspiration photos that just are kind of physically impossible. You see it with food too. You see it on DoorDash when you’re looking up what to order, very clearly, AI generated images of like a burger and fries or something. You know, if you’re looking at the Kindle bookstore, maybe you want a cozy little fantasy story, a lot of what you might see, especially if you’re doing children’s books, is like AI-generated garbage, and it’s on YouTube, it’s on every platform you can possibly imagine.
McCarty Carino: So how do social media platforms sort of inadvertently or maybe directly incentivize this kind of stuff proliferating?
Jennings: Yeah, I mean, because most platforms that we’re talking about incentivize engagement at all costs, basically like whatever people are sharing, looking at, commenting on, liking, whatever, that’s going to be more likely to be seen by other people. And because AI imagery tends to be this very kind of extreme, very uncanny, very eye catching in sort of a bizarre way, even if people don’t necessarily like it. It does, you know, stir up emotion, and it does grab attention. And, you know, in the attention economy, that is all that matters. Quality doesn’t matter, whatever. And I also think because these platforms, so many of them have invested in AI, they can’t come out and say, you know, this is a problem. There’s too much AI on our platforms, because they have staked their reputation on their AI tools that they’re now advertising. And so not only is this good for them in the sense that these posts, these AI written posts, get a lot of engagement, but also because they want to be aligned with AI as like a cause.
Meghan McCarty Carino: The stakes can kind of seem not especially high. But what is the effect of the internet filling up with this stuff?
Jennings: Yeah, I think it’s important to note that, you know, this is not the most urgent concern when it comes to AI. Pinterest being a little bit more annoying is not the most urgent concern. We know climate change is a huge concern, and the fact that this could be used to create, like revenge porn of women – and it is being used – these are huge, immediate issues. But I think one of the more insidious problems is that it makes finding human made stuff a lot more difficult on the internet, and so by normalizing slop, we’re making it more difficult for someone who has something to say or something to create or something to share, we’re just making it that much harder for people to do that.
McCarty Carino: Right, I mean, we had a whole ecosystem of content creation on these platforms build up over the last decade or so. How is this affecting that?
Jennings: Yeah, I think it’s really, really changing the Creator economy, because now it’s like, you don’t even really need a face or a voice or a human to sell you stuff. You know, you have people all over the world using different AI platforms to find the best prompts to use in these generators then posting as many prompts as they possibly can to their socials and through the platforms creator programs, which, you know, often pay creators based on how much engagement they get. They are making, you know, thousands of dollars a month just by like, throwing spaghetti at the wall and just churning out whatever these AI platforms are giving them. And so, yeah, you don’t really need to be a classic influencer in order to make money on social platforms anymore. All you have to do is, like, run a couple AI spam pages and maybe one of them will blow up and that’ll be, you know, your paycheck for the month.
McCarty Carino: So do you think we’ve reached peak AI slop? Or is it gonna get worse?
Jennings: I mean, it’s like anything on the internet. As long as people are making money doing it, it will continue to exist, because people have found a way to make a living doing this. And so as long as the platforms keep, sort of, implicitly condoning it, then, yeah, I think we’re nowhere near peak slop then. And it’s interesting, because so many of these platforms now have their own AI generators, like, you can go on your Instagram messages and ask the AI bot, give me some hairstyle “inspo”, or give me caption ideas, and it’ll turn out stuff. So it’s like, I think slop is now infecting even human made stuff. It’s like, what even is slop anymore, if everyone’s using these tools to create their content, then there’s a sort of like, half slop, half human made like version of that.
McCarty Carino: Do you think we reach a point where the internet is so overloaded with this stuff, it just becomes useless? People lose interest in it?
Jennings: I mean, I think that’s what we’re seeing happening with Google search. I think Google search and it’s AI overview tool, which has been, you know, extremely wonky and deeply wrong in many cases, is already kind of pushing people to use other platforms for search. A lot of people use TikTok for search now, people use ChatGPT for search, you know, that’s even more AI, but, like, this kind of stuff really does drive people away from platforms. And so I think if the social media companies see that this is a real thing, that people are not using their platforms as much, then yeah, maybe that’ll move the needle. But I think until then, they will keep, kind of, condoning it.
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