AI slop
In plain wordsLow-quality content churned out in bulk by AI — bland articles, fake-looking images, filler videos — posted to grab clicks or fill space, with little care for accuracy or value.
Material generated with generative AIgenerative AI, n.: AI that produces something new on request, such as an essay, a picture, a song or a piece of code, having absorbed from enormous numbers of existing examples what such things typically look like. and pushed out in quantity with little human attention to whether it is true, useful or wanted: content-farm articles, search-optimized filler, surreal images and videos made to harvest social-media engagement, padded e-books, spam product listings and automated replies. Like 'spam' for unwanted email, the term names a relationship between content and audience rather than a technical category: the output is unrequested and wastes attention. Slop is blamed for degrading search results and feeds, misleading users, crowding out human creators and polluting future training data (see model collapsemodel collapse, n.: The gradual decline of AI models trained on the output of earlier AI models: rare details vanish first, then quality and variety erode, like a photocopy of a photocopy.). The word has spread to work documents (workslopworkslop, n.: AI-generated work that looks polished but does not actually get the job done, quietly passing the real effort to whoever receives it, who must then puzzle it out or start over.), code, scholarship and music.
Half the results for that recipe were AI slop with invented cooking times.
Origin
Applied to AI output from 2022, as image generators reached the public; early uses have been traced to in-group slang on 4chan, Hacker News and YouTube. In a blog post of 8 May 2024, Simon Willison, a British developer, promoted 'slop' as the word for unwanted AI-generated content; newspapers soon took it up, and Merriam-Webster and the American Dialect Society both chose 'slop' as their 2025 Word of the Year.
Usage note
Viral examples include the 2024 wave of surreal Facebook images such as 'Shrimp Jesus' and AI-written event listings that drew crowds to nonexistent events. Distinguish slop, defined by low quality and indifference, from deepfakesdeepfake, n.: A fake but realistic video, photo or voice recording made with AI that puts words in a real person's mouth or shows them in a scene that never happened., which are designed to deceive about specific people or events.
Related
- workslopworkslop, n.: AI-generated work that looks polished but does not actually get the job done, quietly passing the real effort to whoever receives it, who must then puzzle it out or start over.
- model collapsemodel collapse, n.: The gradual decline of AI models trained on the output of earlier AI models: rare details vanish first, then quality and variety erode, like a photocopy of a photocopy.
- dead internet theorydead internet theory, n.: The idea, first a fringe conspiracy theory, that much of what we see online is now made by bots and AI rather than by real people.
- synthetic mediasynthetic media, n.: Images, video, audio or text created or substantially altered by AI rather than recorded or written directly by people, whether for art, entertainment, business or deception.
- LLM-ismsLLM-isms, n.: Words, phrases and habits of style that AI chatbots overuse — certain fancy verbs, tidy lists of three, 'it's not just X, it's Y' — which make writing recognizable as machine-made.
- botshitbotshit, n.: A blunt term for false or made-up chatbot output that people pass on and use as if it were true, especially at work.
- clankerclanker, n.: A slang insult for robots and AI systems, borrowed from Star Wars, that went viral in 2025 as a way of expressing annoyance at, or rejection of, AI.
Sources
- Willison, S. (2024). Slop is the new name for unwanted AI-generated content. simonwillison.net, 8 May 2024.
Mentioned in
AI artAI art, n.: Images, music or other artworks made with the help of AI — from early computer drawing programs to today's prompt-based image generators — and the debate over whether and how such work counts as art., generative AIgenerative AI, n.: AI that produces something new on request, such as an essay, a picture, a song or a piece of code, having absorbed from enormous numbers of existing examples what such things typically look like., text-to-video modeltext-to-video model, n.: An AI that creates a short video clip — increasingly with matching sound — from a written description, such as 'a paper boat sailing down a rainy street'., dead internet theorydead internet theory, n.: The idea, first a fringe conspiracy theory, that much of what we see online is now made by bots and AI rather than by real people., delvedelve, v.: An ordinary English verb meaning to dig into a subject, which AI chatbots used so often in 2023–2024 that it became a joke and a supposed telltale sign of machine-written text., glue on pizzaglue on pizza, n.: A notorious 2024 blunder in which Google's AI search summaries told people to add glue to pizza sauce, having taken an old joke from an online forum as genuine advice., homogenizationhomogenization, n.: The tendency of AI to make things more alike: products built on the same few models share the same flaws, and people who write or create with AI produce more similar work., LLM-ismsLLM-isms, n.: Words, phrases and habits of style that AI chatbots overuse — certain fancy verbs, tidy lists of three, 'it's not just X, it's Y' — which make writing recognizable as machine-made., model collapsemodel collapse, n.: The gradual decline of AI models trained on the output of earlier AI models: rare details vanish first, then quality and variety erode, like a photocopy of a photocopy., SoraSora, prop. n.: OpenAI's video-generating AI, unveiled in 2024 with startlingly realistic clips; a 2025 version added sound and a social app, but OpenAI shut the service down in 2026., synthetic mediasynthetic media, n.: Images, video, audio or text created or substantially altered by AI rather than recorded or written directly by people, whether for art, entertainment, business or deception., workslopworkslop, n.: AI-generated work that looks polished but does not actually get the job done, quietly passing the real effort to whoever receives it, who must then puzzle it out or start over., botshitbotshit, n.: A blunt term for false or made-up chatbot output that people pass on and use as if it were true, especially at work., clankerclanker, n.: A slang insult for robots and AI systems, borrowed from Star Wars, that went viral in 2025 as a way of expressing annoyance at, or rejection of, AI., GhiblificationGhiblification, n.: The March 2025 craze for turning photos into pictures in the style of Japan's Studio Ghibli using ChatGPT's new image tool, and the debate it sparked over AI copying artists' styles., Italian brainrotItalian brainrot, n.: A 2025 internet craze of absurd AI-generated creatures with fake-Italian names — such as a shark wearing sneakers — narrated by AI voices and hugely popular with young children., Simon WillisonSimon Willison, prop. n.: A British programmer and blogger, co-creator of the Django web framework, whose widely read writing on language models coined 'prompt injection' and the 'lethal trifecta'.