As much as I’ve complained about Twitter over the years, at least before Chat-GPT, you could tell that the incredibly stupid opinions you were reading came from the unfolded brains of actual real-life morons and not from that same idiot plugging a simple prompt into a script-generting robot. Chat GPT-speak always has this way of trying to sound measured and rational, which is the opposite of the unhinged, unfettered, unfiltered rhetoric that made everyone keep coming back to Twitter.
Insane posts from Twitter’s prime, whether the posters were trolling or not, truly believed in whatever wild stuff they were saying. Do you think AI-generated tweets could create something as good as Heron Greenesmith Esq?
I, for one, would rather scroll through insane content that makes me angry than milquetoast statements that make me feel nothing, and that’s what I’ve been getting from X lately: A whole lot of nothing.
This problem is by no means limited to X; rather, it has taken hold of the internet at large, infecting nearly every major social platform. Facebook is one of the worst offenders for AI-generated ‘content.’ I have seen photos of an AI-generated old person begging people to wish them Happy Birthday about 100 times, and every time, thousands of users are earnestly fulfilling that wish in the comments, believing that this blatantly AI-generated “person” is real and that it is, in fact, their birthday.
You can clearly see the increase in realism and quality in this type of photo from 2024 to 2025, but does it make it any less an example of cheap content farming? Is there any real value in looking at a photo of a fake veteran (who, by the way, looks way too young to be 100) and wishing him a Happy Birthday? Will being able to do this at a higher quality make the internet better? Or will there just be more posts, more content to sift through, and more reason to not try to create anything better than the lowest common denominator?
Whereas the narrative-serving bots of X (formerly known as Twitter) seem to be driven by more nefarious devices, the AI-generated posts of Facebook seem to be driven by the same mundane motivations that algorithms of social platforms have been fueling for the last decade: An perpetual need for an endless amount of content, generated at the lowest costs and resourcing. Content that offers no inherent value of its own but serves to fill the empty void of its consumers’ bland and blanching lives, while maximizing engagement metrics at the lowest possible effort and input from the creator. This content is what we affectionately refer to as “slop."
The reason that these AI images are so popular is that you just don’t need to do anything more ingenious to get clicks. It’s not that memes and jokes need to be Dostoevsky, but they should at least have some sort of goal or purpose in mind. A meme might exist to make you laugh, think, or communicate an incredibly specific emotion. A tweet might be tweeted to have a question answered by the public or to get something off the poster's chest. Not all memes and posts are high quality or entertaining, but they have a real reason for existing other than just turning off someone's brain so that they’ll stay on their phone or computer longer.
I’m not better than anyone else in regards to constantly consuming internet slop. If you look at my Instagram Reels feed, it’s nothing but robot voices narrating a clearly phony story from Reddit over footage of iPhone gameplay. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I’ll get a Family Guy or South Park video superimposed over the gameplay instead of the robot voice. I can’t blame anyone but myself for this kind of slop taking over my feed. I’m the one who consumes these videos through to the end for hours on end, telling the algorithm to feed me more slop, and there’s no need to suggest anything more interesting than that.
Some might argue that the internet has always been full of slop like this, that the current bot situation is far less bad than the bots that dominated YouTube comments for years. The thing that differentiates the almost nostalgic bots of yesteryear is that nobody was going around acting like they were some great new technology or innovation that was going to make the internet better. Everyone hated them, and rightfully so, because they were annoying and added nothing to the experience. AI, on the other hand, has so much money and hype around it, and we’re expected—no, being conditioned—to be excited about what it’s supposed to be instead of what it is.
The arguments against using AI at all for internet content have fallen on deaf ears. A negligible number of people care enough about stealing art for copyright infringement to stop people from generating the specific styles and work and trademarks of creative pioneers and studios, drowning us in an unstoppable tide of low-effort images in a style ripped off from Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli, posted by people proudly displaying their cartoonish “art” as if they themselves have accomplished something of merit. Meanwhile, Sarah Jessica Parker is reposting AI-generated videos of her and the cast of SATC as babies without critique or introspection.
This content will continue to be made whether you like it or not. The question is whether you’ll continue allowing slop to be the bulk of what you consume.
I genuinely don’t think every AI post is slop there is a certain amount of effort and unique idealism behind an AI generation that can lead AI to actually create truly unique and creative things. But for every video of Squidward singing ‘Being Alive’ from Company, there are 10 million fake grandmas asking to wish them a Happy Birthday. There’s a lot of stuff in the middle that is a matter of personal taste, but you can’t deny we’ve gotten more and more used to engaging with whatever content is put in front of us just so we don’t have to listen to the sound of our own thoughts.
We often forget that we have autonomy about the content we consume. If you spend hours a day scrolling through a website being spoon-fed content that makes you miserable, you have the power to stop! The problem is that stopping engaging with content that makes you feel numb to the world won’t stop everyone else from doing the same. We’re in the middle of a war on our attention spans across all generations. If you even slightly care about the content you consume, you should make some sort of effort to leave the slop behind. Otherwise, that’ll be all we will be feasting on forever and ever.
