How AI slop is clogging your brain (www.npr.org)

A recent episode of AI + U, hosted by Brittany Luse with guests Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell and writer Emma Marris, explores the rise of “AI slop” — low-quality but pervasive AI-generated images, videos, and content flooding the internet. Harwell highlights a booming side‑hustle economy: students and gig workers use generative tools to crank out novelty content and make money quickly, while creators and platforms profit from attention-driven churn. The result is a glut of uncanny, often shallow material that crowds out higher-quality work and shapes what people see online. Technically, Marris stresses why this matters: current models remix training data and lack the capacity to invent genuinely new styles or cultural forms, so heavy reliance on them risks cultural stagnation. More ominously, the ability to produce many slightly different variants — “AI pasta” — makes repeated, tailored misinformation and synthetic media far more convincing and scalable, acting as a force multiplier for propaganda. The episode underscores both social and technical implications: democratized, realistic synthetic content lowers the barrier for manipulation, while the attention economy accelerates its spread. Marris’s suggested countermeasure is simple but personal — reduce engagement with monetized noise — pointing to broader questions about platform design, media literacy, and the limits of current generative models.