Slop is low-quality AI-generated content – including the written word and images – made using generative technology. Coined in the 2020s, the term has a derogatory connotation akin to “spam”. Digital clutter.

Katie Notopoulos writing for Business Insider in June 2024 says of slop:

“Common themes involve old people holding a birthday cake asking you to wish them a happy birthday; babies doing things babies shouldn't do; snakes eating buses, bikes, or other vehicles overloaded with hundreds of babies or some other cargo; soldiers with prosthetic legs; women with missing limbs and huge busts; and Jesus. The images are often sort of eerily exploitative.”

Jonathan Gilmore, a professor of philosophy at the City University of New York, describes the "incredibly banal, realistic style" of AI slop as being "very easy” to generate. Hence its proliferation.

AI slop has proliferated on social media in part because it is revenue generating for its creators on Facebook and TikTok, and this is especially incentivising for people from lower-income countries to create images that appeal to US audiences, thereby attracting higher advertising rates. The sole purpose of slop is to look like human content to capture traffic and generate advertising revenue.

Early uses of the term "slop" as a descriptor for this content apparently came in reaction to the release of AI art generators in 2022. Its early use has been noted in the comments sections of 4chan, Hacker News and YouTube as a form of in-group slang.

British developer Simon Willison is credited for being an early champion of the term "slop" in the mainstream, which he did in May 2024 on his personal blog.

“I think having a name for this is really important, because it gives people a concise way to talk about the problem,” says Willison in an article for The Guardian.

The term gained increased popularity in the second quarter of 2024 in part because of Google's use of Gemini AI model to generate responses to search queries, and was widely used in media headlines by fourth quarter 2024.

Journalist Jason Koebler from 404 Media speculated that the bizarreness 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

The Atlantic has 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, the technology offering "cheap, fast, on-demand fodder for content".

After Hurricane Helene, an AI-generated image of a girl holding a puppy while sitting in a boat floating on flooded waters circulated among Republicans, who used it as evidence of failures of the Biden administration to respond to the disaster.

You may be aware of the "Auntieverse" — a surreal tribute to "auntie culture" by Singaporean artist Niceaunties. It is a visual feast that fuses AI and imagination and celebrates the eccentric, vibrant world of aunties with reverence and awe. This is not slop. NiceAunties has a focused style resulting in finessed images that feel more thoughtfully designed and intentional rather than randomly generated.
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References

wikipedia.org/wiki/Slop_(artificial_intelligence)
xatakaon.com/robotics-and-ai/the-internet-brought-us-spam-ai-is-bringing-us-slop
wired.com/story/ai-generated-medium-posts-content-moderation
businessinsider.com/meta-facebook-ban-ai-slop-images-shrimp-jesus-why-2024-6

Images

1. Shrimp Jesus appeared on Facebook in 2024. Generation prompt was: "a person who looks like Jesus but who is made completely out of live shrimp, swimming underwater in the turquoise ocean, with a shrimp halo, and his hands dissolving into a shoal of shrimp"
2. Indian woman on bike with babies and buritos. Huh?
3. Image generated using a slop prompt designed to appeal to a US audience, from a Hindi-language seminar: "american soldier veteran holding cardboard sign that says ‘today’s my birthday, please like’ injured in battle veteran war american flag"
4. Coca-Cola boy
5. Shark holding hands with fleeing woman and man
6. More birthday slop
7. AI-generated image of a girl holding a puppy while sitting in a boat floating on flooded waters. Slopaganda?
8. Examples of imagery generated by Singaporean artist Niceaunties
9. Video: "The Weird and Wonderful Art of Niceaunties" | TED 2024, Vancouver