AI bots<\/a>, creating bot content for bot followers, who comment and argue with other bots. The rise of slop has, appropriately, the shape of a good science-fiction yarn: a mysterious wave of noise emerging from nowhere, an alien invasion of semi-coherent computers babbling in humanlike voices from some vast electronic beyond.<\/p>\nBut the idea that AI has quietly crowded out humans is not exactly right. Slop requires human intervention or it wouldn\u2019t exist. Beneath the strange and alienating flood of machine-generated content slop, behind the nonhuman fable of dead-internet theory, is something resolutely, distinctly human: a thriving, global gray-market economy of spammers and entrepreneurs, searching out and selling get-rich-quick schemes and arbitrage opportunities, supercharged by generative AI.<\/p>\n
![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/01743789caec28a86d5ed390d9ea6bf1dd-harriet.h447.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
EVERYTHING IS SLOP | In Advertising: Bizarre ads like this one from the airport authority of Tours, France, have appeared in the London tube.<\/p>\n
Photo: AI<\/p>\n
![\"\"\/](\"\")
<\/p>\n
On Television: Even set designers seemingly can\u2019t resist the ease of using AI, as in these props from True Detective: Night Country.<\/p>\n
Photo: AI<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
At the Bookstore: Books with strange cover art, fake authors, and questionable text have become common on Amazon.<\/p>\n
Photo: AI<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
On Social Media: On Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, outlandish images drive engagement.<\/p>\n
Photo: AI<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In Scientific Papers: In one study, 10\u202fpercent of the publications reviewed were found to include AI content.<\/p>\n
Photo: AI<\/p>\n
We know that the original source of these things was side-hustle scams,\u201d Clarke told me. \u201cPeople waving a bunch of money on YouTube or TikTok videos and saying, \u2018Oh, you can make money with ChatGPT by doing this.\u2019\u201d Clarke could even trace spikes in submissions to specific videos: It\u2019s not some burgeoning artificial super-intelligence or even a particularly sophisticated crew of scammers that has waylaid Clarkesworld; rather, it\u2019s the audiences of influencers like Hanna Getachew, an accountant and technology-procurement manager who runs an Amharic-language YouTube account dedicated to \u201cteaching side hustles and online jobs\u201d \u2014 and who recently posted a video called \u201cGet Paid With Clarkes World Magazine.\u201d (Clarkesworld pays 12 cents per word for submissions of 1,000 to 22,000 words. Getachew claims viewers can \u201cearn between $250 and $2,460.\u201d)<\/p>\n
The economics involved are simple. On one end, the demand: the effectively infinite, indiscriminate appetite for content of websites like Facebook and TikTok, which need enticements for users and real estate for advertisers. On the other, the supply: the astonishingly adequate, inexhaustible output of generative-AI apps like ChatGPT, Midjourney, or Microsoft\u2019s Image Creator, heavily subsidized by investors and provided to consumers at low or no cost.<\/p>\n
Billions of dollars are flowing among the many companies on either side of this dynamic, and the question for any would-be AI hustler is how to get in the middle, find an angle, and take a cut. The simplest, most straightforward option is to be a \u201cslopper\u201d: someone who generates content at scale using AI and manipulates or leverages a platform to make money from it. Sloppers may try to sell their content directly to people on a major marketplace \u2014 by, say, automating the production of recipe books to sell to unsuspecting (and maybe undiscriminating) customers on Amazon. Or they may build a website filled with articles generated by an LLM, festoon them with advertisements, and try to get them highly ranked on Google News. Maybe, and most straightforwardly of all, many simply vie for direct payments from platforms for AI-generated text, images, and videos: Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter all offer bonus payments for \u201cengaging\u201d content. (In a sense, so does Spotify, though we call those payments \u201croyalties.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Take, as a case study in the slop economy, Facebook. Since the beginning of this year, obviously AI-generated images from anonymously administered pages have become inescapable. What began as riffs on already viral images have evolved into bizarre, sui generis dreamscapes through which inexplicable and unrelated themes and topics emerge: multiheaded, enormously breasted \u201cfarmer girls\u201d; stewardesses wading in muddy rivers; amputee beggars carrying signs reading TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY. One of the most famous of these images is \u201cShrimp Jesus,\u201d a statuelike Jesus figure bobbing just underwater, his limbs and torso made entirely of the bristling chitinous bodies of shrimp. For the majority of these pages, there is no obvious scam at play, no ads or external links \u2014 no business model at all, just eerily contextless pages publishing demented nonsense into a void.<\/p>\n
Where were these images coming from? The answer, at least in part, is a guy in Kenya named Stephen Mwangi. (At least, I think that\u2019s his name and where he lives.) Stevo, as he introduced himself to me over WhatsApp, is the moderator of five YouTube channels and \u201cabout 170 Facebook pages\u201d that deal heavily in AI-generated images, the largest of which has 4 million followers. He agreed to show me his methods, for a price. \u201cIf you need my information pay me,\u201d he wrote. \u201cNo free information.\u201d For a total of $105, I enrolled in a crash course in becoming a slopper.<\/p>\n
His process for creating posts, he told me, is pretty simple and AI intensive: \u201cI use ChatGPT to ask for the best images that can generate a lot of popularity and engagement on Facebook,\u201d focusing on topics like the Bible, God, the U.S. Army, wildlife, and Manchester United. \u201cWRITE ME 10 PROMPT picture OF JESUS WHICH WILLING BRING HIGH ENGAGEMENT ON FACEBOOK,\u201d read the ChatGPT prompt in one screenshot he shared with me. You then take the prompts to the image-generation programs Leonardo.ai and Midjourney. Voil\u00e0: slop.<\/p>\n
These pages make money through Facebook\u2019s Performance bonus program, which, per the social network\u2019s description, \u201cgives creators the opportunity to earn money\u201d based on \u201cthe amount of reach, reactions, shares and comments\u201d on their posts. It is, in effect, a slop subsidy. The AI images produced on Stevo\u2019s pages \u2014 rococo pictures of Jesus; muscular police officers standing on the beach holding large Bibles; grotesquely armored gargantuan helicopters \u2014 are neither scams nor enticements nor even, as far as Facebook is concerned, junk. They are precisely what the company wants: highly engaging content.<\/p>\n
On a website like Facebook, the more strikingly weird an image is, the more likely it is to attract attention and engagement; the more attention and engagement, the more Facebook\u2019s sorting mechanisms will promote and recirculate the image. Another AI content creator, a French financial auditor named Charles who makes bizarre pictorial stories about cats for TikTok, told me he always makes his content \u201ca bit WTF\u201d as \u201ca way to make the content more viral, or at least to maximize the chances of it becoming viral.\u201d Or as Stevo put it, \u201cYou add some exaggeration to make it engagementing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stevo, who insisted he doesn\u2019t \u201cuse bots\u201d to juice his follower numbers or \u201cpay for engagement,\u201d shared a screenshot that showed a $500 \u201cbonus earnings\u201d payout for activity from mid-May to mid-June this year. (Minimum wage in Kenya ranges from about $120 to $270 a month.) It\u2019s not really passive income, either. He said he spends about six hours a day administering his Facebook pages, but he works at the mercy of the website\u2019s opaque moderation and decision-making processes. When I spoke with him, \u201cGod Lovers\u201d had been placed under some kind of restrictions and wasn\u2019t earning him money. He wasn\u2019t sure what the problem was, but it wasn\u2019t that the images were fake. \u201cI have other pages which have over 100,000 followers which use AI images,\u201d he said. Facebook doesn\u2019t reveal how it calculates the value of the bonuses, and only creators in certain countries \u2014 the U.S., the U.K., and India among them \u2014 are eligible for the bonus program, which helps explain why, several times during our interview, Stephen insisted he was actually a British cybersecurity student named Jacob.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a Stephen (and often a \u201cJacob\u201d) behind all of this slop: an actual person uploading, say, identical Viking \u201cnovels\u201d with seemingly AI-generated covers, all called Wrath of the Northmen: A Gripping Viking Tale of Revenge and Honor (that one has been published variously by authors named Sula Urbant, Sula Urbanz, and Sula Urbanr). The sloppers gather on message boards and chat apps and social media to swap tips and tricks. On Facebook, a 130,000-member group of Vietnamese sloppers called \u201cTwitter Academy \u2014 Make Money on X\u201d discusses methods of prompting ChatGPT to write X threads: \u201cYou are a Twitter influencer with a large following. You have a Funny tone of voice. You have a Creative writing style. Do not self-reference. Do not explain what you are doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are also hundreds of thousands of videos across the internet giving detailed instructions similar to the ones Stephen gave me. Jason Koebler, co-founder of 404 Media, an independent tech-news collective that acts as the publication of record for the world of slop, watched dozens of Hindi-language slop seminars on YouTube, many of them offering example prompts: \u201camerican soldier veteran holding cardboard sign that says \u2018today\u2019s my birthday, please like\u2019 injured in battle veteran war american flag,\u201d \u201cA old American women is making forest lion out of cauliflower and her neighbors looking at it. keep it detailed.\u201d<\/p>\n
The creators of these kinds of seminars, equipped with the \u201csell shovels in a gold rush\u201d playbook, often have a more reliable income than the sloppers themselves. They sell lesson plans and memberships to private Discord and Telegram chat rooms and act as middlemen who help set up U.S.-based accounts for international sloppers. If sloppers are the manufacturing sector of the slop economy, these gurus, vouchers, and toolmakers represent the service sector.<\/p>\n
This ecosystem is not new. Influencers have been hawking platform-dependent \u201cinternet marketing\u201d schemes for decades. What has changed is the level of work and investment involved. For a while now, it has been common for entrepreneurs to outsource the actual production of content: \u201cI have two people in the Philippines who post for me,\u201d one American Facebook-page operator told The New York Times Magazine in 2016. But when you\u2019ve got an automated post-creating machine, who needs two people in the Philippines? For that matter, given the sophistication of the AI, why would the Filipinos need an American?<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no definitive way to tell how much slop has already been produced in the few short years generative-AI apps have been widely available, but there are ways to get a glimpse. Guillaume Cabanac, a professor of computer science at Universit\u00e9 Toulouse III\u2013Paul Sabatier, has spent the past several years attempting to ferret out instances of fraud, plagiarism, and the use of computer-generated text in major scientific journals. One of his methods is to focus on what he calls \u201csmoking guns\u201d \u2014 phrases that show unambiguously the use of an AI text generator like ChatGPT. One of these is \u201cregenerate response,\u201d which appears at the end of ChatGPT\u2019s answers. \u201cThe persons did all that copy-paste and didn\u2019t even care to remove\u201d the telltale phrase, Cabanac said. Others are \u201cas an AI language model,\u201d \u201cas of my knowledge cutoff,\u201d and \u201cI cannot fulfill that request,\u201d phrases that ChatGPT and other chatbots use frequently.<\/p>\n
Cabanac has found almost 100 cases of obviously AI-generated scientific papers, which he called \u201conly the tiny tip of the iceberg.\u201d A recent study by the librarian Andrew Gray used words that appear disproportionately often in text generated by ChatGPT \u2014 among them commendable, intricate, and meticulously \u2014 to estimate that 60,000 scholarly papers were at least partially generated by AI in 2023.<\/p>\n
You can do your own versions of these experiments at home. Searching \u201cas of my knowledge cutoff\u201d or \u201cas an AI language model\u201d in Google Books turns up hundreds of AI-generated \u201cbooks\u201d with titles like Hollywood\u2019s 100 Leading Actors and Summary If the Woman in Me: A Guide to Britney Spears Memoir. On Amazon, a quick search found a listing for some (presumably real) underwear with the description \u201cAs of My Knowledge Cutoff in Early 2023, Providing Specific Purchasing Options for \u2018Women\u2019s Stylish Sexy Casual Independence Day Printed Panties\u2019 Would Be My Capabilities As I Cannot Browse or Access Live Data From the Internet, Including Current Inventory From or Private Sellers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Twitter \u2014 Elon Musk\u2019s X \u2014 may be the most fruitful platform for this kind of search thanks to its sub-competent moderation services. In January, Chris Mohney, a writer and an editor, spotted a tweet that appeared to be an AI-generated description of an image with no image attached: \u201cThe photo captures a couple exchanging vows at sunset. The emotions that it evokes are love, happiness, and the memory of a special day filled with promises.\u201d Hundreds of verified accounts swarmed in the replies to praise the missing image: \u201cThis picture exudes pure love and joy, a magical moment indeed!,\u201d \u201cThis photo truly encapsulates the beauty and magic of true love,\u201d \u201cSuch a beautiful moment captured in time, filled with love and joy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cabanac believes \u201cLLMs can be a magnificent tool, a very effective tool\u201d for scientists if properly acknowledged. Some researchers, especially those for whom English is not a first language, use ChatGPT and other AI programs to help with translation and editing. But many people \u201care using the LLMs to produce more, which lowers the quality of the science that is published and made.\u201d Even innocuous misuse has a cascading effect on the entire scientific enterprise, as retracted papers cast doubt on other papers that cite them. \u201cThe error propagates, right?\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s like a virus.\u201d<\/p>\n
AI-generated papers, Cabanac argued, are often used to pad an academic\u2019s r\u00e9sum\u00e9 with more publications and citations: \u201cYou buy a paper on a topic of your choice, and you buy a set of 500 citations. Then you go to your faculty and you say, \u2018Look, I\u2019m a genius, and I deserve this position as a full professor.\u2019\u201d In other words, like Facebook slop, the content of the content isn\u2019t really as important as its presence \u2014 or, more accurately, its measurability.<\/p>\n
This is the most widespread use yet found for generative-AI apps: creating stuff that can take up space and be counted. When you look through the reams of slop across the internet, AI seems less like a terrifying apocalyptic machine-god, ready to drag us into a new era of tech, and more like the apotheosis of the smartphone age \u2014 the perfect internet marketer\u2019s tool, precision-built to serve the disposable, lowest-common-denominator demands of the infinite scroll.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s nice to think that if you could simply turn off your phone and computer, you could avoid all these ugly creations. But slop has a way of leaking out. In the most recent season of True Detective, a heavy-metal poster in the background of one scene was obviously and cheaply AI-generated. (The showrunner insisted the poster was diegetically AI-generated.) On the subway, ads for the secondhand-furniture website Kaiyo feature images with oddly levitating pedestrians and signs written in the dream glyphs typical of image generators\u2019 attempts at text.<\/p>\n
Outsourcing designwork to generative-AI apps may be an effective cost-cutting and productivity measure for some businesses, but in practice it just off-loads work elsewhere. The cost of slop to libraries is serious, Sullivan said, \u201cnot just the cost of the books\u201d but the cost of labor: It takes cataloguers longer to do their jobs when they\u2019re wading through \u201can outpouring of valueless product.\u201d Human artists, writers, journalists, musicians, and even TikTokers have more work to do too, competing not just with other humans but with the passable products of automated systems.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s more work for us readers and watchers and content consumers as well. The future portended by the past two years is one in which we all become cataloguers, Neil Clarkes sorting through the noise for a little bit of signal. Even the stuff that passes through is a burden; unrefined, unedited slop is by definition more work to read, watch, interpret, and understand.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s also, it seems, what we want. The other important participants in the slop economy, besides the sloppers and the influencers and the platforms, are all of us. Everyone who idly scrolls through Facebook or TikTok or Twitter on their phone, who puts Spotify on autoplay, or who buys the cheapest recipe book on Amazon is creating the demand.<\/p>\n
Fifteen years ago, Wired magazine heralded the \u201cgood-enough revolution\u201d in low-cost technology: \u201cCheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere \u2026 We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished.\u201d Generative AI as a technology exists in this lineage. That it can create adequate texts and images is an astonishing leap forward in machine learning, but the texts and images are still only adequate, \u201cgood enough\u201d and cheap enough for people to thumb past on their phones. Slop is the most appropriate word for what it produces because, as disgusting and unappetizing as it may seem, we still eat it. It\u2019s what\u2019s right there in the trough.<\/p>\n
Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism.
\n If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the September 23, 2024, issue of
\n New York\u00a0Magazine.<\/p>\n
Want more stories like this one? Subscribe now<\/a>
\n to support our journalism and get unlimited access to our coverage.
\n If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the September 23, 2024, issue of
\n New York Magazine.<\/p>\n One Great Story: A Nightly Newsletter for the Best of New York<\/p>\n
The one story you shouldn\u2019t miss today, selected by\u00a0New York\u2019s editors.<\/p>\n
Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n
By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms<\/a> and Privacy Notice<\/a> and to receive email correspondence from us.<\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Illustration: Zohar Lazar This article was featured in One Great Story, New York\u2019s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":120939,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[57679,733,57681,1638,5344,57677,35165,57682,57680,57678,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-120938","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-internet","8":"tag-ai-chatbots","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-hard-paywall","11":"tag-internet","12":"tag-internet-culture","13":"tag-life-in-pixels","14":"tag-new-york-magazine","15":"tag-newsletter-pick","16":"tag-one-great-story","17":"tag-select-all","18":"tag-technology","19":"tag-uk","20":"tag-united-kingdom","21":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120938\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/120939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/e023ab50ea4e0393e5610b913498f03f02-SLOP-OPENER-FINAL-1.rhorizontal.w1100.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/6831083d6ef673b57ad7ec1de99e620117-SLOP-SECONDARY-FINAL-1.w710.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/7383eaba7a1aaef54f476ab7de8f1daa4c-meta-.h447.jpg)
<\/p>\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/394041b222118953f1d0b90ede5a334dc9-Foragers-Harvest101.h447.jpg)
<\/p>\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/7ae66e6192d74f49792c3e6ecd2083a9ad-nortment.w670.jpg)
<\/p>\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/52f49831ae94733d870ad64f4e248bc8c3-spellboundquest.h447.jpg)
<\/p>\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/6e478f320bf879a1e878ff524880a54c66-boy--.h447.jpg)
<\/p>\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/8bdb3d50202b0e065f50b19338ff1d1a4c-sea--.h447.jpg)
<\/p>\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/b6829c11baf7bfb243cf3ca33951ad679f-Babies.h447.jpg)
<\/p>\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/434db89f9a758f31fba2559f5a82a129ec-birthday.h447.jpg)
<\/p>\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/576179871c4917375fba16be01681670d8-speaksout.rhorizontal.w670.jpg)
<\/p>\n