"AI slop the low-quality, surreal content flooding social media platforms, designed to farm views is a phenomenon, some would say the phenomenon of the 2024 and 2025 internet. Merriam-Webster's word of the year this year is slop, referring exclusively to the internet variety. It came about shortly after the advent of popular large language models, such as ChatGPT and Dall-E, which democratised content creation and enabled vast swathes of internet denizens to create images and videos that resembled to varying degrees the creations of professionals."
"Notable among these was shrimp Jesus, a viral trend in which Facebook was briefly flooded with AI-generated images of the deity fused with crustaceans. Shrimp Jesus was quickly followed by hallmarks of the AI slop genre: videos of old women claiming to celebrate their 122nd birthday, and mini soap operas about the dramatic lives of cats. In 2025, the flood continued, growing more uncanny and more explicitly copyright-violating."
A surge of low-quality, surreal AI-generated content known as "slop" dominated social media in 2024–25. The term "slop" became Merriam-Webster's word of the year, tied to the widespread availability of large language and image models like ChatGPT and Dall‑E. Viral moments included the "shrimp Jesus" trend and short, uncanny videos such as centenarian birthday claims and feline soap operas. In 2025 the volume of such content intensified and increasingly violated copyrights. A notable trend called Ghiblification repurposed images in the style of Studio Ghibli after OpenAI released a GPT-4o–powered image generator.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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