AI slop, also known as slop content or simply slop, is digital content made with generative artificial intelligence that is perceived as lacking in effort, quality, or meaning, and usually produced in high volume to gain advantage, to earn money, or to deceive people. 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 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. The effect of increasing AI slop on the web has been likened to the increase in entropy as driven by the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Origin of the term 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.
Definitions
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.
Beyond these family resemblances, there are many different kinds of AI slop. Three main "dimensions of variance", or ways in which AI slop can vary, are its instrumental utility (why was it created?), the level of personalization (is it so specific as to only be interesting to one person or a small friend group?) and the level of surrealism, where some AI slop is "ludicrously implausible", while other slop is more realistic. Art curator Francesco D'Isa considers it wrong to say that AI "produces only slop", and sees the majority of human production as having "always been slop", with the canon of art being "the surviving tip of an immense iceberg of forgotten, derivative, or simply boring creations".
On social media
AI image and video slop have proliferated on social media in part because it can generate revenue for its creators on Facebook and TikTok, most notably affecting Facebook. This incentivizes individuals from developing countries to create images that appeal to audiences in the United States, which attract higher advertising rates. A medical student in India said he made thousands of dollars each month from low effort, AI-generated images on Instagram and Fanvue. After his first attempt to go viral failed, he refined his social media posts to include MAGA rhetoric to appeal to conservative American men, creating the influencer character "Emily Hart" with AI. He tried the same tactic with a politically progressive message, but he said it was quickly rejected as "AI slop".
The journalist Jason Koebler speculated in an article for 404 Media that the bizarre nature of some of the content may be due to the creators using Hindi, Urdu, and Vietnamese prompts (languages which are underrepresented in the model's training data), or using erratic speech-to-text methods to translate their intentions into English. Speaking to New York magazine, a Kenyan creator of slop images described giving ChatGPT prompts such as "WRITE ME 10 PROMPT picture OF JESUS WHICH WILLING BRING HIGH ENGAGEMENT ON FACEBOOK", and then feeding those created prompts into a text-to-image AI model such as Midjourney.
AI-generated images of plants and plant care misinformation have proliferated on social media. Online retailers have used AI-generated images of flowers to sell seeds of plants that do not actually exist. Many online houseplant communities have banned AI-generated content but struggle to moderate large volumes of content posted by bots. Facebook spammers have been reported as AI-generating images of Holocaust victims with fake stories; in reality there are only a handful of historical photographs taken at Auschwitz concentration camp. The posters were described as "slop accounts", and the Auschwitz Memorial museum called the images a "dangerous distortion". History-focused Facebook groups also have been inundated with AI-generated "historical" photos.
Slopper, a pejorative slang term derived from "AI slop", was coined in 2025 to describe someone who is overly reliant on generative AI tools like ChatGPT. Users on social media have begun using AI-generated images to build massive followings by fooling viewers. This strategy has been popularized for those who are interested in an easy way to get an income online as all that is needed is one post, of the hundreds posted weekly, to gain traction and encourage the quickly made content. Some creators are frustrated that their hard work is being stolen by AI-generated content. An artist, Michael Jones, created physical wood carvings of animals using a chainsaw, but the style of the sculptures was taken by and used as a source for AI-generated content, which began to surface with other people beside them, claiming to have made the sculptures themselves. Jones stated that AI-slop is "a huge issue for carvers all over the world who are sadly missing out on the rightful credit exposure to their work..."
According to a 2025 report by video creation and editing service company Kapwing, South Korea ranks first worldwide in AI slop consumption. Experts say the phenomenon is driven by the country's rapid embrace of new technology. In January 2026, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan stated that reducing slop and detecting deepfakes were priorities for YouTube in 2026. A March 2026 investigation by The New York Times found that around 40% of videos recommended to children, both on the main platform and on YouTube Kids, appear to be AI slop, often with realistic or Cocomelon-style visuals. The videos often claim to be educational and are disproportionately about the English alphabet, but they often feature nonsensical and flashy content, such as oddly proportioned horses hatching from eggs. Around the same time, The 74 and Mother Jones released a report about children's videos on YouTube that feature disturbing content, contain misinformation such as misspelled words or misidentified objects, or depict imitable behavior that is dangerous. In March 2026, a TikTok account centered around an AI-generated parody of the reality show Love Island using AI-generated anthropomorphic fruits, called Fruit Love Island, became one of the fastest-growing accounts in the United States, leading to debate in online communities about monetization of AI-generated content.
In politics
United States In August 2024, The Atlantic noted that AI slop was becoming associated with the political right in the United States, who were using it for shitposting and engagement farming on social media, with the technology offering "cheap, fast, on-demand fodder for content". AI slop is frequently used in political campaigns in an attempt at gaining attention through content farming. In 2025, in the first five months of Donald Trump's second tenure as US president, Trump posted several AI-generated images of himself on official government social media accounts, such as images of him as the pope or as a muscular man brandishing a lightsaber. In August 2024, Trump posted a series of AI-generated images on his alt-tech social media platform, Truth Social, portraying fans of the pop singer Taylor Swift in "Swifties for Trump" T-shirts, as well as an AI-generated image of Swift appearing to endorse the Trump 2024 presidential campaign. The images originated from the conservative Twitter account @amuse, which posted numerous AI slop images leading up to the 2024 United States elections that were shared by other high-profile figures within the Republican Party, such as Elon Musk, who has publicly endorsed generative AI. In 2025, Wired described Trump as "The first AI slop President", noting his frequent use of AI-generated images and videos in public messaging. The magazine highlighted examples such as AI depictions of Trump as a fighter pilot and as a religious figure, arguing that his reliance on low-quality generative content marked a new phase in political communication.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in 2024, Republican social media influencers such as Laura Loomer circulated an AI-generated image of a young girl holding a puppy in a flood, and used it as evidence of the purported failure of President Joe Biden to respond to the disaster. The Republican activist Amy Kremer shared the image while acknowledging it was not genuine. The initial version of the Make Our Children Healthy Again Assessment, a report on children's health issues released by a commission of cabinet members and officials of the Trump administration, and led by US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., reportedly cited nonexistent and garbled references generated using AI.
In February 2025, Trump shared an AI-generated video on Truth Social and Instagram depicting a hypothetical Gaza Strip after a Trump takeover. The video's creator said it was made as political satire. During the Gaza war, AI-generated media was used to exaggerate support for both sides, and to evoke sympathy using fake images of suffering civilians. Because of content restrictions in generative AI, these images and videos rarely depict people wounded in battle, instead focusing on damage to buildings. Fake images of attacks were used to avoid accidentally providing intelligence to enemies.
In response to the No Kings protests in October 2025, Trump posted a video depicting himself flying a fighter jet and releasing feces on crowds of demonstrators, including Harry Sisson, a Democratic influencer. In the midst of disruptions to food stamp distribution during the 2025 US government shutdown, anonymous social media users began using OpenAI's Sora AI model to post slop videos of "welfare queens" complaining, stealing, and rioting in supermarkets; many comments to the videos appeared unaware that they were AI-generated, or acknowledged that they were AI-generated but nonetheless useful in pushing a narrative of widespread welfare fraud. In April 2026, on Orthodox Easter, Trump posted a picture of himself depicted as Jesus, drawing widespread criticism from Evangelicals and Catholics, resulting in Trump deleting the post hours later and claiming he believed he was depicted as a doctor.
Russia and China