WHAT IS slop?
Slop is a bit like spam, but I'm afraid it's worse.
It's the term for the low-quality words and pictures generated by artificial intelligence (AI) online. Like digital black mould, it festers and spawns in the dark corners of websites and the airless expanses of social media. And once you notice it, you realise it is everywhere.
The term is thought to have been coined by a developer named Simon Willison. He hoped to focus minds on the sort of useless, weird and misleading content that begins to proliferate online following the rollout of large-language models such as ChatGPT and Gemini and image-diffusion models such as Dall-E and Midjourney.
If you've performed a Google search in the last year or so, you've probably encountered some slop, since…
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The Oldie (Digital) - 1 Issue, April 2025