Move over spam – there’s a new four-letter word ruining your social media feed. And that word is “slop.”
The American Dialect Society and Merriam-Webster both named “slop” their 2025 Word of the Year. But this isn’t farm animal food. It’s the term for low-quality, AI-generated junk flooding every platform from Facebook to TikTok.
Think of the most absurd image you’ve seen go viral – maybe those bizarre photos of impoverished children with beards sitting in the rain holding birthday cakes. The images are obviously fake, missing hands, sporting weird deformities, yet somehow collected nearly one million likes on Facebook.
That’s slop. And it’s everywhere.
A 20-year-old student in Paris got so frustrated seeing this garbage flood his Facebook feed that he started an account called “Insane AI Slop” to call out the fakes. Within weeks, he had 133,000 followers. His inbox flooded with submissions from people who had noticed the same problem.
The patterns are always the same: religious imagery, military veterans, heartwarming stories about poor children doing impressive things. These topics grab attention and rack up engagement. AI spammers in developing countries feed prompts to ChatGPT like “WRITE ME 10 PICTURES OF JESUS WHICH WILLING BRING HIGH ENGAGEMENT ON FACEBOOK” and pump out hundreds of variations.
The scary part? Holocaust victims are being AI-generated with fake backstories. Non-existent plants are being sold online using fake AI flower photos. Houseplant communities have had to ban AI content entirely because the volume is unmanageable.
Tech companies aren’t exactly rushing to fix this. Mark Zuckerberg called this “the third phase of social media” on an earnings call and said AI-generated content would “explode.” YouTube admitted over one million channels used their AI tools last month.
Facebook and TikTok actually profit from this because slop generates engagement. And engagement equals advertising dollars.
The backlash is building. But with AI tools getting more powerful every month, the slop show is just getting started.