The internet is drowning in AI slop. Here's how we got here.

If your feed is inundated with AI slop these days, you're not alone. "Slop" is a squishy, subjective term — it depends entirely on what you think looks cheap, lazy, or low-effort. Still, the vibe people are describing tends to be the same: mass-produced content, shoddily plopped into the feed, neither discerning nor pleasurable. Why should AI output be any different than grayish cafeteria slop?

Generative AI has been feeding social media since its inception, but the shift has recently become more pronounced. We've covered this great slopification at Mashable. Heck, there's a laundry list of just animal-based AI slop we've covered: fake animals "caught" on surveillance tapes, emotional support kangaroos, musicians with critter companions, or heavy machinery "cleaning" barnacles off whales.

So, the obvious questions are: How much AI slop is there, really, and why?

How much AI slop is out there?

There's no definite way to know how much AI slop is out there, and your mileage may vary on what constitutes slop.

For what it's worth, AI slop was defined by Quinnipiac University technologist Adam Nemeroff as "low-to mid-quality content — video, images, audio, text or a mix — created with AI tools, often with little regard for accuracy." And there has been some research conducted on AI-generated content online. Notably, SEO firm Graphite published a study last month that found 52 percent of new articles online were generated by AI, based on an analysis of a sample of 65,000 random articles posted between January 2020 and May 2025. Graphite CEO Ethan Smith said you could glean some knowledge about other types of content from the study.

"Do I think that ad copy is generated with AI? There's probably a good amount of that," Smith told Mashable. "There's probably a lot of social media posts that are AI-generated."

He added you'd probably see more AI-generated tweets — text is easy to generate, after all — and a medium level of AI content on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Even if 52 percent of the internet were AI-generated content, that's at least below at least one expert's 2023 prediction that it'd be 90 percent by 2025.

Still, it's prevalent enough that everyone with an internet connection has encountered AI-generated content out there that's obvious and, well, sloppy. Researchers at Amazon Web Services have found, for instance, that large swaths of the internet are poorly done, AI-generated translations. In other words, slop begets slop in different languages.

It's clear that if you're not prompting chatbots carefully, the output remains subpar. It may be why you see AI-generated comments that make no sense or trending videos with nonsensical, non-sequitur lists that really feel like AI.

So, there's no exact figure for how much slop we're seeing, but you can certainly feel it. You notice swipe after swipe.

"My suspicion would be that every person who is into social media, on average, when they open their phone and scroll one of these apps, they're going to see a slop reel," said Aidan Walker, an internet culture researcher.

Why is there so much slop?

AI slop is everywhere because it's easy to create, and because "slop" in this context describes content made fast, at scale, with little risk or care.

"Because there is such a low bar to entry, it kind of made it a lot more possible for people not just to produce content, but to produce it at volume," Walker said. "Take a bunch of shots at the target and, inevitably, if you post 100 videos, one or two of them are going to get some traction."

Not that social media was ever a sacred space — though there was a time it was good — but we should consider what that much AI slop does to our collective online experience. What becomes of a platform that requires you to wade through mountains of junk to find the jewels?

"The proliferation of this slop and the opportunity cost of it — the real estate, the mind-share it takes up on a platform — that's the danger," Walker said. "It degrades these online spaces."

Consider people's complaints about what AI has done to the quality of Google search, and then extrapolate that to your website of choice. That’s not to say all AI-generated social content is bad. AI can make memes in a snap or generate a voice clip for a joke. The tool is neutral; the intention behind the output is what shapes its quality.

Lots of slop is created by people hustling for a dollar. Its content is meant to fool you just long enough to grab a sliver of your attention. It's a commodity, not a craft. And crucially, labeling it "slop" is about how it feels to the viewer, not some objective failing.

"Nobody's really a fan of these AI slop accounts. They all blend together," Walker said.

And that's the real sensation of a feed overwhelmed with AI-generated content. It blends. It blurs. It feels grabby but artless — a morass, a muck. In a word, for many people, slop.