Slop is the new spam Could AI make the internet useless?

Your email inbox is full of spam. Your letterbox is full of junk mail. Now your web browser has its own affliction: slop. This is what you get when you shove material generated by artificial intelligence up on the web for anyone to view.

- Alex Hern, Dan Milmo

Unlike a chatbot, the slop isn't interactive, and is rarely intended to answer readers' questions or serve their needs. Instead, it functions mostly to create the appearance of human-made content, benefit from advertising revenue and steer search engine attention towards other sites.

Just like spam, almost no one wants to view slop, but the economics of the internet leads to its creation anyway. AI models make it trivial to automatically generate vast quantities of text or images, providing an answer to any imaginable search query, uploading endless shareable landscapes and creating an army of supportive comments. If just a handful of users land on the site, reshare the meme or click through the adverts hosted, the cost of its creation pays off.

But like spam, its overall effect is negative: the lost time and effort of users who have to wade through slop to find the content they're actually seeking far outweighs the profit to the slop creator. "I think having a name for this is really important, because it gives people a concise way to talk about the problem," says the developer Simon Willison, one of the early proponents of the term "slop".