I open Instagram and find ten private messages, one after the other. One sends me a reel with Michael Jackson fighting with a lightsaber, another Freddie Mercury saying nonsensical things, yet another Einstein explaining cryptocurrencies, then a video of the Mona Lisa singing Barbie Girl in a metal version and so on. As soon as you open them you immediately know that it’s not really them, for example Freddie opens his mouth and I recognize him instantly: the teeth aren’t his, and the eyes aren’t his either, and the voice is fake, and what he says is supposed to make you laugh. But the real new trend is AI slop. For those who don’t know, slop is the word that American nerds use to define the waste material of artificial intelligence: images with too many fingers, videos with faces that melt, digital voices that fake non-existent emotions (definition now made official also on Wikipedia). The literal translation is “pimp”, “mush”, the one that was given to pigs. And AI slop is exactly this: a digital mush produced automatically by generative models that no one controls, driven by algorithms because it keeps people glued to watch even when there is nothing to watch, a blob of content that reproduces itself, driven by the obsessive-compulsive curiosity generated by the feeds.
In the United States, TechCrunch and Business Insider reported on the new Meta feed, called “Vibes”, where the name already seems to have been chosen to mask boredom: an infinite flow of videos generated by AI, passed off as “fresh entertainment”, in reality increasingly similar to each other, more slop than social, I would have called them yawn, except that while you yawn you continue to see others and you don’t they fall asleep, at least that’s what they were for. According to Wired, the most disturbing thing is that this visual error, this deformation of the human, is becoming an accepted language, a new aesthetic of the defect: trash elevated to a global language. On the other hand, it makes me think, if trash has always been strong on television, let alone on social media, especially if you don’t even have to go to the trouble of creating it yourself.
On Reddit, meanwhile, users write “I’m so sick of seeing AI slop in my reels”, or “Every time I open Instagram it’s all weird AI freak shows”, and even “I block one and three more appear”, as if it were no longer possible to distinguish the human from the residue. Meta has announced that it will show 50% more Reels published on the same day (I read on BetaNews), as if the problem was the freshness of the mush. The Washington Post even talked about entire channels that live by producing only slop: dozens of videos a day, generated automatically, with millions of views and no idea behind them, where even failure is monetized: in short, not having an idea, having it generated by AI, and if it turns out weird, even better, and making money from it too.
What generation will emerge? What will they call us in the future? (Assuming they are better than us in the future, at this rate I have my doubts). The slopped generation? Slop is no longer an insult, it’s a human condition. After all, it is us: the raw material of the feed, the last biological residue within a self-sustaining digital ecosystem. Every day someone incapable of generating their own thought generates a slop, a video generated to be shared as if it were inevitable. Out of politeness you reply, “Oh, cool,” or you take revenge by giving him another one. I am reminded of the legendary video in which Steve Jobs announced the first iPhone, a revolution: no longer a stylus, just your finger. No keyboard, touch screen.
Steve has never seen the generative degeneration of social media, while Zuckerberg will never hold a conference like this regarding his feed algorithm: you can’t go on stage and say that your new revolution is
make you scroll through hours of AI-generated nonsense without realizing it.