I had a fascinating conversation with Jessica Silbey (BU Law) and Woodrow Hartzog (BU Law) about their thought-provoking article, AI Slop.
A few interesting relevant quotes:
1. Merriam-Webster selected “slop” as its 2025 word of the year:
Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen slop as the 2025 Word of the Year. We define slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” All that stuff dumped on our screens, captured in just four letters: the English language came through again.
2.From Jill Lepore, The Prehistory of AI Slop, The New Yorker (May 18, 2026):
Machine-generated writing, though it doesn’t smell as sweet, has something of molasses’s smothering stickiness. One way to think about the internet is that it’s an attempt to archive nearly everything ever written by anyone who ever lived. Recently, more and more new writing online is being produced by bots, during this, the Great A.I.-Slop Flood. Ante-ChatGPT, more than ninety-eight per cent of all English-language articles being published on the internet were written by humans. By the fall of 2024, machines were writing around half of such articles, according to the digital-marketing agency Graphite, which, far from taking umbrage at the usurpers, recommends using A.I. to help run your ad campaigns. And why not? In one blind test, people found A.I.-generated advertisements to be “of higher quality” than ads made by humans.
3. From Jessica Silbey & Woodrow Hartzog, AI Slop:
[D]rawing from descriptive accounts of AI slop and scholarly research, we propose a provisional definition of slop as an output of a generative, probabilistic automated system produced with little exertion that asymmetrically burdens recipients and tends to degrade cultural domains. We break this definition down into its three parts and explore how slop exists along a spectrum. AI output can be more or less “sloppy,” depending upon the relative presence of AI slop’s three constituent parts: negligible exertion, asymmetrical imposition, and domain degradation.
There are at least three specific ways in which AI slop degrades domain. First, AI slop floods the field, overwhelming our organizational systems and cultural repositories by displacing more desirable and
beneficial communication, research, and creative work. In doing so, it raises the cost of identifying and comprehending communications, research and creative work we actually seek. Additionally, AI slop cheapens human effort by encouraging shortcuts and avoiding the kind of intentional cognition and effort necessary to progress science, sustain organizations, build strong relationships, social solidarity, and a thriving public sphere. It inculcates a festering resentment among those burdened by it, and it frays
the trust and assumption of sincerity that are vital for hard work, collaboration and the adaptation of social institutions. Finally, AI slop introduces vices and errors into our domains, deforming information and processes essential for working together and identifying or investigating truths about the world. . . .
We conclude that AI slop is a useful and important concept in AI discourse and policymaking. It provides a shorthand for distinguishing between harmful AI output that has little value and the kinds of meaningful human authorship that strengthens our cultural domains. It helps focus our attention on the harms of AI to be avoided and on the search for whatever targeted and limited uses of generative AI might provide some benefit. The concept of AI slop as defined also highlights the pathologies of generative AI for social institutions, which we have argued AI threatens to destroy.
4. From Max Reed, Drowning in Slop, New York Magazine (Sept. 2024):
Slop started seeping into Neil Clarke’s life in late 2022. Something strange was happening at Clarkesworld, the magazine Clarke had founded in 2006 and built into a pillar of the world of speculative fiction. Submissions were increasing rapidly, but “there was something off about them,” he told me recently. He summarized a typical example: “Usually, it begins with the phrase ‘In the year 2250-something’ and then it goes on to say the Earth’s environment is in collapse and there are only three scientists who can save us. Then it describes them in great detail, each one with its own paragraph. And then — they’ve solved it! You know, it skips a major plot element, and the final scene is a celebration out of the ending of Star Wars.” Clarke said he had received “dozens of this story in various incarnations.”
These are prime examples of what is now known as slop: a term of art, akin to spam, for low-rent, scammy garbage generated by artificial intelligence and increasingly prevalent across the internet — and beyond. From their weird narrative instincts and inert prose, Clarke realized the stories came straight from ChatGPT. Sometimes they would arrive with the original prompt included, which was often as simple as “Write a 1,000-word science-fiction story.”
t was relatively easy to identify an AI-generated submission, but that required reading thousands (a “wall of noise”) and manually sorting them. Clarke compared the problem to turning off the spam filter and trying to read your email: “Okay, now multiply that by ten because that’s the ratio that we were getting.” Within weeks, the problem became unmanageable. “We had reached the point where we were on track to receive as many generated submissions as legitimate ones,” Clarke told me. Eventually, on February 20, he made the decision to close submissions temporarily. Clarkesworld had become one of the first victims of AI slop.
In the nearly two years since, a rising tide of slop has begun to swamp most of what we think of as the internet, overrunning the biggest platforms with cheap fakes and drivel, seeming to crowd out human creativity and intentionality with weird AI crap. . . .
* * * *
Daniel J. Solove is the Bernard Professor of Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the George Washington University Law School. He is the founder of TeachPrivacy, a company that provides workforce privacy, cybersecurity security, and AI training to companies and organizations around the world. He is the author of 10+ books and 100+ articles.
You can follow his events, writings, training, cartoons, and resources by subscribing to his free weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to Solove’s Free Substack
A supplement to Solove’s regular newsletter with more in-depth discussions
