You’re heard of spam (the digital junk that fills our inboxes with unwanted offers) but have you heard of slop?

“Slop” is a new term that describes the AI-generated content flooding our newsfeeds — a phenomenon that’s been widely observed, but lacked a precise term to capture it until now.

Like its predecessor, slop content isn’t always of the highest quality, but it doesn’t need to be. In the same way that email made it possible to send letters to millions of people a day, AI tools make it simple to generate thousands of new accounts with millions of posts, and at that level, it’s inevitable that something will break though to its intended audience.

But why does slop exist?

There are a lot of theories about the motivation to set up bots that churn out slop, but two in particular seem to be most plausible.

The Reward Theory

First, the platforms are literally set up to reward this type of behaviour.

On Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and other channels, creators get cold, hard cash in exchange for racking up millions of views on their content. The amounts are enough to create incentives for people around the world to find way to hack the system.

For example, did you ever come across the Shrimp Jesus phenomenon? For months, Facebook was awash with bizarre images that show various combinations of Jesus with the body of a shrimp, Jesus made up of hundreds of shrimp, shrimp with a Jesus head, and every other combination you can imagine.

What appears to have happened is that AI-fuelled bot farms had been pumping out whatever content got the most likes and views, and at the same time, AI-powered accounts had been artificially liking and sharing content, and those two forces met in a doom-loop that spawned a near-infinite number of Shrimp Jesus posts.

When you give AI an objective, it will do whatever it takes to get the job done, even if that means creating an unholy combination of crustacean messiah just for the views.

The Misinformation Theory

The robots don’t bear all of the blame for slop. Some of it lies squarely on the shoulders of us humans and our relentless need to misinform each other.

It seems that every major world event now comes with a rash of slop, which makes sense because that’s where everyone’s attention is focused. In the hours and days after recent hurricanes tragically hit the shores of the United States, slop started to appear on Facebook, X, and other social media channels, and some was convincing enough that elected officials and news outlets were sharing the fake images.

Sometimes the images are as benign as a young girl with a puppy in a rowboat. Other times the content is more malevolent, deliberately spreading misinformation about rescue efforts, and attempting to sow division at a fragile time.

The incentives for slop that misinforms are classically human, and in this case, AI is simply an amplifier of a practice that has been going on since the invention of the printing press.

The Bizarre Internet Theory

A third possible reason for the explosive growth of slop is simply that on the internet, if something can be done, it will be done for the lulz.

For example, the Instagram account of Ethos, a popular new restaurant in Austin, Texas, quickly racked up over 75,000 followers and posts about its creative dishes generate a ton of engagement. But there’s just one catch: Ethos does not actually exist.

There is a website that is fully populated with AI-generated content, but when you go to make a reservation, you’re redirected to eelslap.com, which is exactly what it sounds like. (Don’t say we didn’t warn you).

So What?

The truth is that the rise of slop can likely be credited to a combination of all three forces.

Whatever the cause, we have entered into a new, sloppier phase of the internet. One where anything we see, no matter how convincing, will need to be met with skepticism.

The good news for those of us creating content for our organizations is that all of this will create more demand for imperfect, human-connection style content.

In a way, the Sloppy Internet may actually create more opportunities for those of us with smaller production budgets, because while AI is pouring billions of dollars into replicating the highest quality images and videos in the world, striking fear into the hearts of traditional video producers, we’ll be over here talking to our iPhones and creating connections that can’t be generated by an LLM. At least for now.