AI Slop–How Every Media Revolution Breeds Rubbish and Art (www.scientificamerican.com)

“Slop” is the emerging label for mass-produced, low-quality AI output—content that’s mindlessly generated and pushed on audiences who didn’t ask for it. The term, traced to 2022 and later popularized by the poet-technologist “deepfates” and amplified by developer Simon Willison, captures a wider cultural panic that treats all AI creations as pollution. The essay argues this reaction echoes earlier media revolutions: Gutenberg’s cheap prints, Grub Street pamphleteers, and early nickelodeons all produced tons of trash but also widened participation, incubated new artforms, and eventually yielded lasting treasures. The piece’s core significance for AI/ML practitioners is practical and ethical: the marginal cost to produce “slop” has collapsed toward zero, creating an onslaught that imposes cognitive, attention, and environmental costs (heavy compute). Blanket condemnation of AI risks discarding novel, human-guided works that are original, surprising, and valuable. Instead, the community should adopt sharper vocabularies and curation practices to identify and elevate “keepers,” while discouraging what’s purposeless. In short, slop is predictable and often harmful, but history suggests mass production also widens the on‑ramps for innovation—so the challenge is to channel the flood, not simply dam it.