Slop as a Way of Life

AI slop is just the culmination of how humans have been using the internet for years

Jul 30, 2025

Yesterday morning, I walked past the small grocery store on my block and heard REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” emanating from inside. I’d usually ignore that kind of thing but here it suddenly struck me as absurd—it was 9:30 am on a weekday and there was absolutely no reason for that song to be coming out of an empty grocery store. Not even annoying or dissonant, it was just the least appropriate accompaniment for the moment, in its own subtle way. And of course there was no reason for it—no person had chosen the song and the process that led to it playing then had no audience in mind. Music fills the aisles of retail businesses so reliably that it’s more notable to encounter silence, and usually the playlist is sonic wallpaper of the proto-Spotify Top 40 variety, but here the mismatch was just enough to nudge me out of my sleepwalk and make me smile. It was slop. Lately the idea of slop has fascinated me. I’ve started seeing it everywhere and grasping for a more expansive definition of it. Slop is probably the definitive term of our current digital experience; it increasingly functions as shorthand for all of our vague frustration with digital technology. Although most people wouldn’t call that REM song slop, its appearance in that context fits my working definition: content as environmental filler, a choice that’s not quite right (but also not quite wrong), which nobody really wanted, probably unnoticed, meant to only register at a subliminal level, and put in place to negate a worse alternative: silence.

The popularity of “slop” as a concept points to something significant about how we experience digital culture in 2025, just as “algorithms” did last decade. In each case, the term’s usage gets less precise as it’s overloaded with everything we hate about the internet. And while the word itself becomes less meaningful, it reveals more about how we feel. It’s tempting to define slop as Potter Stewart did pornography (“I know it when I see it”) but that would just further obfuscate an already murky concept. Today, “slop” implies AI more than anything else, and primarily refers to the AI-generated content that is flooding the internet. The subtext is that slop is being dumped on us against our will—that it’s something that happens to us—but that lets us off the hook far too easily. Most of the slop we see is still made and distributed by real people, often with no AI assistance. If AI is able to suddenly pump slop into our environment it’s only because we already turned on the faucets ourselves. Just think about all the garbage content that people you actually know send you via text, or the DMs that feel like they’re from bots but are actually from real people driven by platform incentives (Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc). The arrival of AI slop is simply the culmination of a long process of cultural slopification, and one of AI’s unexpected functions has been to launder the human slop so we can pretend we didn’t create it.

I call the REM song I heard slop because it’s a good example of this process: The automation of personal music listening, a process accelerated by Spotify but long underway in places like the supermarket aisles, is ultimately a process of “learning to care less about details and perceive distinct things as interchangeable,” as I wrote last year. In slop utopia, there is no right or wrong place or time for anything to happen, because context has been eliminated. The end result of this process, as Liz Pelly has described, is an opportunity for AI content creation, which barely registers because the human-made content with which it coexists has already become fungible. The appearance of AI slop is not something new, just a sign that an ongoing slopification process has been completed. REM is one of my favorite bands (although I don’t need to hear “End of the World” much more) but the key characteristic of slop is appearing for no reason. Slop can be made from high-quality ingredients, after all, if the context is properly eliminated. Interestingly, the word “slop” has drifted toward AI and away from its previous meaning, amorphous fast casual food served in bowls. The two uses are consistent in the sense that both describe the shapeless recombination of ingredients that may or may not be good into something that can be delivered efficiently via stream infrastructure. Reading an entire book, listening to an album, or even finishing a full-length film thus feels heroic now that most content is broken down into tiny bits. Avocado toast famously became the symbol of frivolous millennial excess, but at least the toast provided a solid foundation for the mash on top. Now we understand: There was more slopification yet to be done.

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