Why Slop Is Here to Stay

If you think content created by artificial intelligence is bad, you should take a closer look at what humans are making.

Credit: Milindri.

Sometimes, when I feel the pressure of a looming deadline like a vice around my frontal lobe, I will open Instagram and let the feed wash my brain of worry. I’m not proud of this habit, but it has allowed me to glimpse the abyssal plains of content, where minds go to be temporarily lobotomized, my own included. It’s like a cerebral crackhouse, a place where you go to crash out for a bit in a strange room before finding your way back through the narrow, filthy hallways, stumbling over the overdosed, eventually getting back out into the sunlight and fresh air.

I’ve written about slop in the past and how artificial intelligence is ushering in a whole new era of slop content. But slop isn’t just the stuff machines spit out, and if AI-generated slop is popular, it is because human-made slop is as well.

Culture Slop

To illustrate what I mean, let me point you to a popular content creator named Luke. He’s got nearly three million followers on Instagram and tens of millions of subscribers on YouTube. Luke posts the same kind of video with very little variation. Each one consists of him scarfing down food, often something that appears to be very spicy, oversized, and bizarre, like a corndog covered in Fruity Pebbles or a giant “Cheeto” covered in several different kinds of hot powders and sauces. Most of the giant weird stuff he eats looks like it’s made out of rice or corn syrup.

Luke, a white kid with blue eyes, speaks in this kind of Japanese game show host cadence and ends every clip by staring into the camera and saying, “NO REACTION,” unfazed by the heaps of biowaste he ostensible consumed. His content blends mukbang and ASMR, and it is heavily edited, which is how you know that Luke doesn’t do more than chew and spit after every take.

Credit: LukeDidThat via YouTube.

It feels like the perfect thing for the moment, to be honest. It is so outrageously stupid, extravagantly wasteful, crushingly unoriginal. And it is for all these reasons that it has a kind of hypnotic quality. It’s addictive. I am sure there are people who believe Luke really does digest all that trash—he would be morbidly obese or dead by now if he did—but far more know it’s fake and don’t care. That’s not why he’s got their attention. Most people don’t watch it because it’s good. Instead, content consumers are enthralled by how awe-inspiringly awful it is, sucked into the mind-numbing badness as the algorithm serves up one video after another, Luke’s hollow eyes wide and swallowing like portals into the depths of nothingness.

Luke is one of innumerable creators making this sort of mindless content, long before the advent of AI-generated slop. And if you pay attention, you can spot identifiable ingredients in it that appear in other genres.

Allow me to point you to the fake outrage over Sydney Sweeny’s big naturals.

Outside of a small and loud camp of deranged, miserable people, the vast majority of Americans are not upset about Sweeny’s denim ad with American Eagle. It is an utter non-story. However, content creators never miss an opportunity to dumb down the discourse, and so you’ve probably seen a few posts about it.

“LIBERAL TRIGGER!” tweeted Gunther Eagleman to his 1.5 million followers. “Another Sydney Sweeny ad just dropped.” Except the ad in question had actually come out in June and caused no controversy at all. But that didn’t matter. Eagleman’s tweet has nearly 100,000 likes and 13 million views.

“I love nothing more than watching the libs meltdown,” replied LauraleaMAGA, who may or may not be one of the bots who make up over one-third of internet traffic, lending credence to the suspicion that the web is actually a graveyard haunted by inhuman spirits.

“It is awesome!” replied Gunther, who, though apparently human, is not actually Gunther Eagleman. His real name is David Freeman, and he was reportedly fired from a Texas police department, which seems pretty hard to do.

Another variation of this content can be found in the new trend of claiming that liberals are mad about sorority girls existing.

“The purple hair lesbians have to be furious that SEC sororities ARE BACK” wrote Joe Kinsey while sharing a sorority recruitment video that showed a group of girls dancing. Kinsey, the senior editor of right-wing sports website OutKick, would have you believe that lesbians hate nothing more than young, attractive females being cute. It makes perfect sense if you are an idiot or have had your brain tenderized by slop.

Of course, many of the same people trafficking in this type of content were only last year sharing similar videos as evidence of civilizational decline and the pandemic of unchaste “roasties” who are at the heart of all our problems.

There’s a human centipede quality to this type of slop content, with the bowel movement traveling from anonymous accounts with names like “The Patriot Oasis” run by people based somewhere in Southeast Asia to Turning Point USA head Charlie Kirk and then the edge of the new right in figures like Charles Cornish-Dale, who posts as “Raw Egg Nationalist.” These people are all essentially just defecating whatever is trending into one another’s mouths, adding a personal touch here and there, but fundamentally, it is all the same: phantoms woven from thin air by people whose only currency is outrage and illusion. Cornish-Dale himself is a prime example of how absurd this whole thing is, having presented himself a blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan bodybuilder while mocking “brown” people from behind anonymity for not sharing in his Dolph Lundgren genetic Übermensch qualities, going so far as to have Fox News cast a Scandinavian-looking strongman as his double for TV—only to be revealed as swarthy someone who would fit in at an Algerian bazaar. And that is fine, it is important to embrace who we are. “Dark Briton,” he said after being outed. Yes, and I am a Spaniard.

It’s not surprising, then, that AI-generated slop, the kind that Elon Musk is now constantly promoting, has become so popular, so virulent. Indeed, Musk has all but abandoned politics and spends much of his time sharing Grok-made videos of pornographic anime girls. But in a way, Kirk, Charles, and accounts like Patriot Oasis and influencers such as “Gunther Eagleman” are essentially doing the same thing: encouraging their audiences to masturbate to content that validates whatever prejudices are in fashion for the next 24-hour media cycle. Musk, at least, asks you to goon to buxom catgirls, invites you to embrace unreality. It’s a scam, probably a crime against humanity for which he will someday face a tribunal, but it is more honest somehow, like Luke pretending to gobble up mountains of strange junk food and saying, “NO REACTION,” knowing that you are in on the joke instead of making you the butt of the joke, which is what the others are doing.

AI slop is here to stay, but not because it is uniquely deceptive or sophisticated. It’s here for good because people want slop, and many get it disguised as political discourse and culture wars anyway. One of the least surprising developments has been the right’s embrace of slop produced by AI. In fact, the Trump administration is planning to collaborate with PragerU to create AI content.

“What’s the matter babe, you haven’t even liked Donald Trump Jr.’s AI-generated slop of his father as Sydney Sweeney posing for American Eagle?”

I’ll pass.

Give me PBS productions like this three-part, six-hour documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick on Ernest Hemingway. It might be “liberal,” but at least it is real. And that is really going to be a dividing line in the future. Those who are content with mind-numbing trash, whether it is generated by people or machines, and those who want something more, something real, something human.

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