AI Slop Is Eating The Internet (And You’re Eating It Too)

There was a time when “content” felt like a generous word.

A beautiful essay shared to the world… a well-edited short film on YouTube… a great tweet when we had Twitter… A smart whitepaper with unique research behind it.
Even a meme that hit your brain in the right way… and you shared it generously… and your connections thanked you for it.

Now?

It’s AI-generated trampoline rabbits on CCTV.
It’s AI-generated listicles that feel vaguely familiar (and smeared with questionable ads).
It’s AI-generated reviews for products that don’t exist… written by people who were never born.
It’s AI-generated comments on LinkedIn…. written by someone’s “AI marketing automation software” as a way to boost their own metrics.

This is the era of AI slop… and we’re marinating in it.

What is AI slop?
It’s not just bad content (we had that long before anyone was using ChatGPT).
It’s content made for machines… not humans.
It exists to catch an algorithm’s eye… not yours (and yet it does).
It’s the auto-written YouTube description.
It’s the podcast transcript spun into 10 SEO-chocked blog posts.

It’s an ocean of sludge where the goal isn’t creativity or communication… it’s volume to please the algorithm.

As Axios put it: “The weirder it is, the more time we spend looking at it, signaling the algorithm that we want to see more like it.”
And that’s the trick.
The trampoline rabbit goes viral because it’s uncanny.
We can’t look away… we click… digital rubber-necking.

The platforms are not only built for it, but have been building themselves up to be primed for this moment.

TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn… these are no longer places to follow your network.
They’ve become digital slot machines.
And every pull loads in AI slop from accounts you’ve never followed, optimized for a momentary pause and an accidental scroll… or click.
Two thirds of your Instagram feed is now from strangers… and that’s by design.
As John Oliver recently said in his takedown of AI slop:
“It’s pretty… galling for the same people who spent the past decade screaming ‘fake news’ at any headline they didn’t like to be confronted with actual fake news and suddenly be extremely open to it.”

The issue isn’t just quality.. it’s credibility… and what it’s doing to our own reality.

When the slop floods your feed, even real content starts to feel fake.
A real video with real consequences?
Just another rabbit on a trampoline.
And this isn’t a glitch… it’s the business model.
In countries like Indonesia, Pakistan and India, slop farms are churning out AI content by the gigabyte… because even if each post earns pennies, at scale, the numbers add up.
And if you can get some of those people to follow the content… you can show them other kinds of content (of the politically-swaying kind).

The content doesn’t need to be smart.

It just needs to look like content.
Here’s what that means for us:
We used to ask, “Is this true?”
Now we ask, “Was this made by a human?”
That’s not a shift in skepticism… that’s a collapse in trust.

Worse: it’s rewiring us.

We’re becoming fluent in slop.
We skim faster…
We feel less….
We dismiss more…

We mistake frequency for importance… weirdness for wit.

And the real stuff?
It’s harder to find.
Harder to feel.
Harder to trust.

But here’s the contrarian take I’m holding on to:

Slop might be the best argument we’ve had in years for human content.
For real voices… for real quirks…
Now, all we need is for the platforms to agree.
For the platforms to recognize and prioritize curation over convenience.

But it’s also on us because AI slop isn’t just clutter… it’s creeping chaos. 

The question isn’t just “How do we get better at spotting slop?”
It’s “How do we keep ourselves from becoming it?”
How do we stop ourselves from engaging with it… helping it get more attention?
It not only cheapens content… but it will confuse the truth.
The antidote isn’t turning off your device or leaving the platform… it’s demanding platforms stop rewarding volume over value.
Because the real danger of AI slop isn’t just what it does to the feed…

It’s what it does to us.

This is what Elias Makos and I discussed on CJAD 800 AM.

Mitch Joel · AI Slop Is Eating The Internet (And You’re Eating It Too) – The Elias Makos Show – CJAD 800

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