There is something about checking my phone, recently, that has felt like turning up at Strega Nona’s home for pasta. I show up hungry, bowl empty and fork at the ready, for a headline, a meme or an Instagram reel. But then the servings do not stop. There are more and more and more of them, the posts, like the pasta in the beloved children’s book, overflowing. The servings come from the ether, a bottomless well of mushy, purposeless, dissociated slop.
It is impossible to avoid slop these days. Slop is what we now call the uncanny stream of words and photos and videos that artificial intelligence spits out, images that are often close enough to our reality to be believed at first glance, but then set off a tinny alarm of unreality. Jesus Christ made out of shrimp. President Trump photoshopped to look like the pope. A cat deep-frying potatoes. A horse made out of bread (thoroughbred).
The word slop is onomatopoetic, conjuring the sound of formless stew being ladled onto a cafeteria tray, sure to be unsatisfying yet in endless supply, landing with a deadening plop.
“Like Oliver Twist gruel,” said Anne Kavalerchik, a sociologist at Indiana University, who deleted Instagram from her phone last year to avoid encountering as much A.I. slop. In February, she wrote on X: “Word of the year should be slop.”
Offline, we are swimming in more slop. “Slop bowl” is the term many use for the nebulous mash of ingredients served up at fast-casual restaurants — Cava, Naya, Sweetgreen, Chopt — where the selling point of the assembly line is efficiency, not craft: “VC-funded millennial slop bowl,” Andy Verderosa, who works in advertising, called it in a recent post on X.
Shein, Temu and other fast fashion brands sell clothing so cheap that the allure of an online order seems less like new outfits and more like the incessant replenishing of outfits, clothes pouring from a tap that will not turn off. “Fast fashion slop,” the designer Joe McGrath called it. On the children’s show Cocomelon, giggling doe-eyed children wiggle in sketches engineered to make sure toddlers do not turn away. “Growing up on Cocomelon slop,” went a recent X post, “graduating to consuming short form content slop.”
There is a set of consistent qualities across these varied servings of slop: videos, social media posts, clothing orders, protein bowls. There is something distinctly nonhuman about them, like they did not come from the same creative processes — writing, filming, cooking — through which people have long made art and videos and meals. There is something at first comforting and then disquieting about their limitlessness, the idea that you can keep being fed videos, packages of sundresses and mushy lunch forever. And there’s something about the product that feels eerie in its regulated homogeneity, every item offering the illusion of choice — Chicken or tofu? You write the bot’s prompt! — but then coming out looking curiously the same.
“It’s complete blah blah blah,” said Danielle Carr, an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, describing the experience of scrolling through slop on her X feed. “Lacan has this notion of empty speech, which is when the patient in analysis is going through their same blah blah blah, empty speech that doesn’t signify anything. It’s similar to that. It’s mind-deadening.”
All these forms of slop also share a firm grip on our routines. Scott Hurd, an executive who works at Catholic Charities USA, decided to give up slop for lent, minimizing unnecessary interactions with A.I.-generated content. “Don’t ask ChatGPT to generate ideas,” Mr. Hurd wrote. “The brain God gave you is far more efficient.” Julia Hava, who hosts the podcast Binchtopia, decided to quit fast-casual eating because she had started to feel a strange unease eating meals designed to wring extra minutes from her day.
“The classic slop bowl is not bad, but it’s not good — it’s fuel,” Ms. Hava, 28, said. “It’s almost the closest we can get to eating Soylent for lunch.” (Slop you can drink.)
Mr. Verderosa, 35, who commutes twice a week into his Manhattan office and then waits in line for a fast-casual lunch, contemplated the ubiquity of slop on a recent Tuesday while ordering a bowl at Dos Toros. He stood inside Brookfield Place, surrounded by a dozen varieties of fast-casual restaurants, in a sea of office workers scrolling on their phones while waiting to be handed their midday mush.
“I’m sure all these slop bowl places — Cava, Naya, Dos Toros — adhere to some sort of crunch-meets-rice-meets-mush ratio that marketers and scientists have perfected,” Mr. Verderosa said. “I’m sure there’s an algorithm that tells every company exactly how crunchy to make every item.”
TikTok feeds, meanwhile, are overtaken by streams of “fast fashion slop.” Thousands of users have embraced the genre of the “Shein Haul” reveal: Somebody hugs to their chest a bulging package, then rips it open and rifles through pounds of pink sequined crop tops, floral bikinis and pinstriped halters in a frenzied flare of enthusiasm. “Me knowing I don’t need anymore clothes but I’m addicted to shein,” reads a typical video caption.
Kyla Scanlon, an economic commentator who coined the term “vibecession,” notes that across different kinds of consumption — how we eat, how we dress, how we post — people are choosing to minimize thought and maximize efficiency, even when the outcome is a little less expressive (your outfit is the same as everyone else’s), a little less satisfying (your lunch bowl tastes just like yesterday’s) or a little less human.
“What we see with fast fashion or fast-casual food is that people order it online and it comes to their door — the more decisions they can outsource to technology, the better,” Ms. Scanlon said.
Much like obscenity, slop can be easier to spot than to define. To Ms. Scanlon, “slop” is the accumulation of vast quantities of unnecessary stuff, clothes that look like they were made to go “straight for the trash can.” To Ms. Carr, “slop” describes an aesthetic that is eerily nonhuman, and makes people feel like they’re losing their grip on reality.
“It evacuates your belief in the realness of yourself and other people,” Ms. Carr said.
It’s early, but there is some research on what A.I. slop exposure could do to our minds. One study from the M.I.T. Media Lab, examining the brain activity of 55 students, found that those completing tasks using ChatGPT had significantly reduced levels of attention. Anthony Wagner, a neuroscientist at Stanford, reviewed a decade of research on how multitasking affected attention and memory, and found that people toggling back and forth between lots of sources of online and offline information performed worse at memory tasks.
Some psychiatrists say it makes sense that being confronted with nonstop online slop comes with cognitive downside. “There can be a fatigue with these low quality, slightly jarring A.I.-generated images that just look a little bit off,” said Dr. Susan Tapert, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Diego, who has examined the cognitive effects of doomscrolling. “There’s this additional moment of decision — is this even coming from a person? Is this at all true?”
People who are finding themselves in the muck — reading slop online, buying slop online — recognize the twinge of dread it induces. Sam Buntz, a tutor and writer in Chicago, was standing in a grocery store recently and pulled up X. One of the first images his scroll yielded was President Trump holding a lightsaber, bulging muscles protruding from a Luke Skywalker Jedi vest, with the caption, “May the 4th be with you.”
“That’s classic slop, coming from the top,” Mr. Buntz thought. As slop tends to do, it raised questions: Was the image A.I. generated? (Seemingly yes.) Had the official White House account really posted it? (It had. But why?) He summed up the way that scrolling through slop made him feel: “It scatters your thoughts and leaves you in this fugue state.”
So now some posters and shoppers are trying to edge away from it. Ms. Scanlon, for example, sees posts from “de-influencers” encouraging people to buy less low quality goods and avoid the slop hangover (all the more useful given the prospect of tariff-related price hikes). Ms. Hava has given up slop bowls. Mr. Hurd, who wrote the essay encouraging people to give up slop for lent, said he had been inspired by observing the A.I.-generated images that his teenage daughter encountered: A.I.-generated action figures, A.I.-generated Studio Ghibli memes. It saddened him to think of her taking it all in.
“If the world is awash in A.I. slop, will the really talented artists of the future be recognized, or are they just going to be washed away in a sea of slop?” Mr. Hurd asked.
He was not sure whether anybody took up his lent appeal. But he was touched when his daughter shared it with her friends, just one protective parent’s plea to stop the slop.
Emma Goldberg is a business reporter covering workplace culture and the ways work is evolving in a time of social and technological change.
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