slop is the new spam by gen ai

Once we had spam, the barrage of unwanted emails flooding inboxes. Now we have “slop”!

Slop is generally a reference to shoddy or unwanted content generated by modern day AI tools.

An example of slop is Facebook’s AI generated “Shrimp Jesus” - an image of Jesus with unwanted iconography of shrimps.

Who needs this unsettling depiction of religion and seafood ?

Slop further evolves into something called “slom” - slop generated by AI tools, spammed across the Internet via the social media network.

Google recently introduced (in the US) a short summary of search results (powered by its LLM Gemini) at the top of the search results. The intent was to give the user a quick summary of what they might be looking for. But it didn’t work out the way they intended, in fact the generated summary was mostly slop 😊.

Google has rolled back this feature now, for the time being.

My take - Slop pollutes the internet, generates unwanted attention to useless content and adds to users time and effort who have to wade through such content to get what they are really looking for.