Terms like "doomscrolling" and "brain rot" have entered our collective vocabularies only in the last several years. Both of them have to do with spending our time doing nonsense, essentially: looking at videos and pictures online that don't have any additional value beyond the instant gratification of a modest laugh.
But recently, there has been danger that our mindless fun of memes and random pics might not even be generated by humans. Even though they appeared nonsensical, there was a human element to these kinds of pictures. You knew that a real person was behind someone holding a wine bottle with a hot dog inside it, no matter how ridiculous the concept seemed. But today, AI slop is threatening to take over.
Even the Merriam-Webster Dictionary announced "Slop" as the word of 2025. They define it as "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence." But the tone of the word doesn't raise alarm; it mocks, Merriam-Webster says.
"The original sense of the word, in the 1700s, was 'soft mud,'" they explain. "In the 1800s it came to mean 'food waste' (as in 'pig slop'), and then more generally, 'rubbish' or 'a product of little or no value.'" Perhaps the word itself carries an important message: nothing AI "creates" can replace human creativity. Not even when it comes to ridiculous, nonsensical content on the Internet. It's almost like AI should stand for "Almost Intelligent."
Unfortunately, AI slop permeates almost all social media sites nowadays. Research by Kapwing shows that around 21-33% of the content on YouTube is either AI slop or brainrot videos. Spain's AI slop channels, for example, have a combined 20.22 million subscribers, and that's more than any other country.
In South Korea, these types of videos have around 8.45 billion views. India's AI slop channel with the most views (2.07 billion) is Bandar Apna Dost, and earns about $4,251,500 a year, according to Kapwing. New users on YouTube are especially vulnerable to seeing AI slop, as approximately 33% of their first 500 shorts will contain brainrot videos.
Apparently, there are even courses for people who want to learn to make AI slop. A journalist who writes extensively about AI slop and brainrot, Max Read, told The Guardian more about how people become AI slop creators. "There are these big swathes of people on Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord and message boards exchanging tips and ideas [and] selling courses about how to sort of make slop that will be engaging enough to earn money," he said. "They have what they call niches. One that I noticed recently is AI videos of people's pressure cookers exploding on the stove."
According to Read, most of them come from middle-income countries where the median wage is less than what they're able to make on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, or Reels. He gives India, Vietnam, Kenya, Nigeria, and Brazil as examples. "Places with relative freedom online to access social media sites," Read explains.
If cats are more your thing, this collection of funny cat memes delivers the same chaotic energy
In general, people are pretty confident they can spot AI content. In a recent CNET study, 44% of U.S. adults said they would recognize AI slop in their feeds. Only 11% find AI content enjoyable or useful, and almost half of all respondents say there should be better warnings online when content is generated by AI. 21% would like it if AI content was banned on social media altogether.
