How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI Slop

Lately, everywhere I scroll, I keep seeing the same fish-eyed CCTV view: a grainy wide shot from the corner of a living room, a driveway at night, an empty grocery store. Then something impossible happens. JD Vance shows up at the doorstep in a crazy outfit. A car folds into itself like paper and drives away. A cat comes in and starts hanging out with capybaras and bears, as if in some weird modern fairy tale.

This fake-surveillance look has become one of the signature flavors of what people now call AI slop. For those of us who spend time online watching short videos, slop feels inescapable: a flood of repetitive, often nonsensical AI-generated clips that washes across TikTok, Instagram, and beyond. For that, you can thank new tools like OpenAI’s Sora (which exploded in popularity after launching in app form in September), Google’s Veo series, and AI models built by Runway. Now anyone can make videos, with just a few taps on a screen.

If I were to locate the moment slop broke through into popular consciousness, I’d pick the video of rabbits bouncing on a trampoline that went viral this summer. For many savvy internet users, myself included, it was the first time we were fooled by an AI video, and it ended up spawning a wave of almost identical riffs, with people making videos of all kinds of animals and objects bouncing on the same trampoline.

My first reaction was that, broadly speaking, all of this sucked. That’s become a familiar refrain, in think pieces and at dinner parties. Everything online is slop now—the internet “enshittified,” with AI taking much of the blame. Initially, I largely agreed, quickly scrolling past every AI video in a futile attempt to send a message to my algorithm. But then friends started sharing AI clips in group chats that were compellingly weird, or funny. Some even had a grain of brilliance buried in the nonsense. I had to admit I didn’t fully understand what I was rejecting—what I found so objectionable.

To try to get to the bottom of how I felt (and why), I recently spoke to the people making the videos, a company creating bespoke tools for creators, and experts who study how new media becomes culture. What I found convinced me that maybe generative AI will not end up ruining everything. Maybe we have been too quick to dismiss AI slop. Maybe there’s a case for looking beyond the surface and seeing a new kind of creativity—one we’re watching take shape in real time, with many of us actually playing a part.

by Caiwei Chen, MIT Technology Review | Read more:
Image:@niceaunties (Wenhui lim)
[ed. See also: Let's Hear It for Slop (word of the year) - with bouncing bunnies included; or here.]