AI-generated images and videos are flooding social sites. People dismiss the trend as AI slop and blame advances in AI. But the media is just the visible manifestation; the deeper problem is an industry stealing attention through manipulative patterns. As the models improve it’s the AI-optimized machines for coopting human attention that will harm us more than any individual future instance of Shrimp Jesus ever can.
Since it’s my own blog I’m going to redefine slop: slop is any media fed to us in quantity by the industrial software machine that converts human attention into profit for its operators. Slop has long existed in various forms, but like many technologies the trend has been towards increasing effectiveness. Inexpensive paperback serials don’t have quite the same pull as radio, comics, then television. More recently we’ve advanced to on-demand bingeable video, shorts/TikToks and other viral “social” content, and now AI-generated shorts. On its own, any individual work is harmless — but when delivered in a manipulative pipeline designed to get people to consume more at the expense of other aspects of their lives, it causes real harm. The machine that delivers the slop is an adversary in this regard.
The benign nature of the individual nugget of slop (a single TikTok, image, etc.) makes it difficult to regulate or legislate against. It’s a freedom issue: people want to consume slop, that’s how it works. But in aggregate, at least some people of all ages (perhaps especially young people) are harmed by overconsumption taking time away from other activities. We need to find ways to fight back.
First we can identify the slop pipelines in our own lives and eliminate them. Sorry Nikita, but I’ve deleted X from my phone where I spend too much time scrolling. On desktop for me it’s not an issue but on my phone I could waste hours in a day. Others I know have deleted other apps such as Instagram and YouTube.
Second, legislation to give individuals the right to protect themselves should be acceptable even to freedom advocates. For example, there must be a way to disable Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. I know multiple people who desperately desire this feature; the fact that it doesn’t exist reveals the malicious intent of the platforms — the adversary.
Third, in the absence of legislation, we can fight back as a software development community — delivering tools to give power to the user to block the slop, and, if you work for one of the great slop pipelines, consider whether you might want to take the ethical step of putting control back in the hands of your users.
Fourth, it’s time to drive more awareness that manipulative content feeds can negatively impact mental health and user’s lives. As a dad myself, reading this makes me concerned for my kids and their friends. Studies need to translate to community understanding and social/school norms and policies.
Many on X have posted some variation of the idea that while shorts have “one-shotted” people, the AI-generated and delivered versions will be far worse. This dystopian prediction isn’t inevitable: for ourselves, our families, and society as a whole the outcome depends on the choices we make and actions we take today. We can still choose to resist slop, incorporate AI into our lives in the positive ways that are clearly possible, and avoid it devolving to simply the next generation tool to abuse human attention for profit. The choice is ours.