AI slop - Wikipedia

AI slop (also known simply as slop ) is digital content made with generative artificial intelligence that is perceived as lacking in effort, quality, or meaning, and produced in high volume as clickbait to gain advantage in the attention economy, or earn money. It is a form of synthetic media usually linked to the monetization in the creator economy of social media and online advertising. Coined in the 2020s, the term has a pejorative connotation similar to spam. "Slop" was selected as the 2025 Word of the Year by both Merriam-Webster and the American Dialect Society.

AI slop has been variously defined as "digital clutter", "filler content prioritizing speed and quantity over substance and quality", and "shoddy or unwanted AI content in social media, art, books [and] search results". Jonathan Gilmore, a philosophy professor at the City University of New York, describes the material as having an "incredibly banal, realistic style" that is easy for the viewer to process.

As early large language models (LLMs) and image diffusion models accelerated the creation of high-volume but low-quality text and images, discussion commenced among journalists and on social platforms for the appropriate term for the influx of material. 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, Hacker News, and YouTube commentators as a form of in-group slang.

The British computer programmer Simon Willison is credited with being an early champion of the term "slop" in the mainstream, having used it on his personal blog in May 2024. However, he has said it was in use long before he began pushing for the term.

The term gained increased popularity in the second quarter of 2024 in part because of Google's use of its Gemini AI model to generate responses to search queries, and the large quantities of slop on the internet were widely criticized in media headlines during the fourth quarter of 2024. It is also used in compound terms; one such example is " Microslop ", used in response to increasing integration of the Microsoft Copilot chatbot into the Windows operating system.

According to an academic article by Cody Kommers and five other scholars that was published in January 2026, AI slop has "so far resisted formal definition." Although they argue it is impossible to precisely describe a boundary between slop and non-slop, Kommers et. al. identify three "prototypical properties" that characterise AI slop: superficial competence, asymmetric effort and mass producibility.