You’ve probably seen the phrase AI slop already, the term most people have settled on for the confusing and oftentimes disturbing pictures of Jesus and flight attendants and veterans that are filling up Facebook right now. But the current universe of slop is much more vast than that. There’s Google Slop, YouTube slop, TikTok slop, Marvel slop, Taylor Swift slop, Netflix slop. One could argue that slop has become the defining “genre” of the 2020s. But even though we’ve all come around to this idea, I haven’t seen anyone actually define it. So today I’m going to try.
This piece does actually settle somewhere very good in its attempt to address the vibe of the entertainment and media world in which we swim, but it is a slog to get there. This is the first paragraph and trying to pull it apart will take a minute. For a start, Broderick says the definition of “slop” has evaded him. That is plausible, but it does require him to have avoided Googling “ai slop definition” upon which point he would have surely seen Simon Willison’s post defining and popularizing the term:
Not all promotional content is spam, and not all AI-generated content is slop. But if it’s mindlessly generated and thrust upon someone who didn’t ask for it, slop is the perfect term for it.
This is a good definition, though Willison intentionally restricts it to describe A.I.-generated products. However, it seems like people are broadening the word’s use to cover things not made using A.I., and it appears Broderick wishes to reflect that.
Next paragraph:
Content slop has three important characteristics. The first being that, to the user, the viewer, the customer, it feels worthless. This might be because it was clearly generated in bulk by a machine or because of how much of that particular content is being created. The next important feature of slop is that feels forced upon us, whether by a corporation or an algorithm. It’s in the name. We’re the little piggies and it’s the gruel in the trough. But the last feature is the most crucial. It not only feels worthless and ubiquitous, it also feels optimized to be so. […]
I have trimmed a few examples from this long paragraph — in part because I do not want emails about Taylor Swift. I will come back to this definition, but I want to touch on something in the next paragraph:
Speaking of Ryan Reynolds, the film essayist Patrick Willems has been attacking this idea from a different direction in a string of videos over the last year. In one essay titled, “When Movie Stars Become Brands,” Willems argues that in the mid-2000s, after a string of bombs, Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds adapted a strategy lifted from George Clooney, where an actor builds brands and side businesses to fund creatively riskier movie projects. Except Reynolds and Johnson never made the creatively riskier movie projects and, instead, locked themselves into streaming conglomerates and allowed their brands to eat their movies. The zenith of this being their 2021 Netflix movie Red Notice, which literally opens with competing scenes advertising their respective liquor brands. A movie that, according to Netflix, is their most popular movie ever.
This is a notable phenomenon, but I think Broderick would do to cite another Willems video essay as well. This one, which seems just as relevant, is all about the word “content”. Willems’ obvious disdain for the word — one which I share — is rooted in its everythingness and, therefore, nothingness. In it, he points to a specific distinction:
[…] In a video on the PBS “Ideas” channel, Mike Rugnetta addressed this topic, coming at it from a similar place as me. And he put forth the idea that the “content” label also has to do with how we experience something.
He separates it into “consumption” versus “mere consumption”. In other words, yes, we technically are consuming everything, but there’s the stuff that we fully focus on and engage with, and then the stuff we look at more passively, like tweets we scroll past or a gaming stream we half-watch in the background.
So the idea Mike proposes is that maybe the stuff that we merely consume is content. And if we consume it and actually focus on it, then it’s something else.
What Broderick is getting at — and so too, I think, are the hoards of people posting about “slop” on X to which he links in the first paragraph — is a combination of this phenomenon and the marketing-driven vehicles for Johnson and Reynolds. Willems correctly points out that actors and other public figures have long been spokespeople for products, including their own. Also, there have always been movies and shows which lack any artistic value. Those things have not changed.
What has changed, however, is the sheer volume of media released now. Nearly six hundred English-language scripted shows were released in 2022 alone, though that declined in 2023 to below five hundred in part because of striking writers and actors. According to IMDB data, 4,100 movies were released in 1993, 6,125 in 2003, 15,451 in 2013, and 19,626 in 2023.
As I have previously argued, volume is not inherently bad. The self-serve approach of streaming services means shows do not need to fit into an available airtime slot on a particular broadcast channel. It means niche programming is just as available as blockbusters. The only scheduling which needs to be done is on the viewer’s side, fitting a new show or movie in between combing through the 500 hours of YouTube videos uploaded every minute, some of which have the production quality of mid-grade television or movies, not to mention a world of streaming music.
As Willems says, all of this media gets flattened in description — “content” — and in delivery. If you want art, you can find it, but if you just want something for, as Rugnetta says, “mere consumption”, you can find that — or, more likely, it will be served to you. This is true of all forms of media.
There are two things which help older media’s reputation for quality, with the benefit of hindsight: a bunch of bad stuff has been forgotten, and there was less of it to begin with. It was a lot harder to make a movie when it had to be shot to tape or film, and more difficult to make it look great. A movie with a jet-setting hero was escapist in the 1960s, but lower-cost airfare means those locations no longer seem so exotic. If you wanted to give it a professional sheen, you had to rent expensive lenses, build detailed sets, shoot at specific times of day, and light it carefully. If you wanted a convincing large-scale catastrophe on-screen, it had to be built in real life. These are things which can now be done in post-production, albeit not easily or necessarily cheaply. I am not a hater of digital effects. But it is worth mentioning the ability of effects artists to turn a crappy shot into something cinematic, and to craft apocalyptic scenery without constructing a single physical element.
We are experiencing the separating of wheat and chaff in real time, and with far more of each than ever before. Unfortunately, soulless and artless vehicles for big stars sell well. Explosions sell. Familiar sells.
“Content” sells.
Here is where Broderick lands:
And six years later, it’s not just music that feels forgettable and disposable. Most popular forms of entertainment and even basic information have degraded into slop simply meant to fill our various feeders. It doesn’t matter that Google’s AI is telling you to put glue on pizza. They needed more data for their language model, so they ingested every Reddit comment ever. This makes sense because from their perspective what your search results are doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you’re searching and getting a response. And now everything has meet these two contradictory requirements. It must fill the void and also be the most popular thing ever. It must reach the scale of MrBeast or it can’t exist. Ironically enough, though, when something does reach that scale now, it’s so watered down and forgettable it doesn’t actually feel like it exists.
One may quibble with the precise wording that “what your search results are doesn’t matter” to Google. The company appears to have lost market share as trust in search has declined, though there is conflicting data and the results may not be due to user preference. But the gist of this is, I think, correct.
People seem to understand they are being treated as mere consumers in increasingly financialized expressive media. I have heard normal people in my life — people without MBAs, and who do not work in marketing, and who are not influencers — throw around words like “monetize” and “engagement” in a media context. It is downright weird.
The word “slop” seems like a good catch-all term finding purchase in the online vocabulary, but I think the popularization of “content” — in the way it is most commonly used — foreshadowed this shift. Describing artistic works as though they are filler for a container is a level of disrespect not even a harsh review could achieve. Not all “content” is “slop”, but all “slop” is “content”. One thing “slop” has going for it is its inherent ugliness. People excitedly talk about all the “content” they create. Nobody will be proud of their “slop”.