Slop is a bit like spam, but I’m afraid it’s worse.
It’s the term for the low-quality words and pictures generated by artificial intelligence (AI) online. Like digital black mould, it festers and spawns in the dark corners of websites and the airless expanses of social media. And once you notice it, you realise it is everywhere.
The term is thought to have been coined by a developer named Simon Willison. He hoped to focus minds on the sort of useless, weird and misleading content that begins to proliferate online following the rollout of large-language models such as ChatGPT and Gemini and image-diffusion models such as Dall-E and Midjourney.
If you’ve performed a Google search in the last year or so, you’ve probably encountered some slop, since the world’s most popular search engine now offers artificially intelligent answers right at the top of the screen. (This is apparently to save you from ever having to leave Google – but mostly to save Google from having to lose digital advertising revenue.)
In one famous early example, Google’s AI confidently asserted that glue was a necessary ingredient in pizza – to stick the mozzarella to the tomato. Willison was also concerned to see a food bank listed among the top tourist attractions in Ottawa.
Such mistakes are hardly surprising. AI is ‘wrong’ anywhere between 10 and 30 per cent of the time – though, considering that answer was in itself provided by AI, you’re advised to take it with some caution.
Still, wrongness is among the more explicable categories of slop. Let me introduce you to Shrimp Jesus. These are images of the Son of God spliced with crustaceans – with prawns for fingers, for example – and they’re everywhere online.
Last year, Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center studied 120 of the most popular Facebook pages and found that 8 per cent of them were regularly posting weird, AI-generated Jesus pictures to an audience of hundreds of millions.
You can see this sort of thing on Instagram too: animations of croissants turning into tiny pandas, men composed entirely of biceps. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg – who reliably takes anything bad and makes it much worse – has promised users more AI-generated content.
Why are they doing this? Simple. To attract your attention. You click on the image and find yourself on some e-commerce site which phishes out your information in order to spam you – or, rather, slop you – with more marketing materials.
And so the slop cycle continues. More and more of this stuff spawns and respawns and generally clogs up every orifice of the internet. Soon there will be almost nothing human left.
Richard Godwin
