"The Macquarie Dictionary has selected its Word of the Year for 2025: "AI slop." It refers to the deluge of low-quality, algorithmically generated content that has come to clog every corner of the internet: the images of Jesus made of shrimp on Facebook, fake news videos of court cases that never happened, the looping videos of synthetic cats doing synthetic things. It is called "slop" because it feels like a waste product of the attention economy."
"But to treat this merely as a quality control issue is a mistake. We are witnessing a crisis not of quality but of authenticity. Our standard critiques of AI tend to focus on the legal questions of copyright or the technical questions of misinformation. We ask: Who owns this data? Is this factually true? Those are valid questions. However, they focus merely on the mechanics of the deception."
“AI slop” names a pervasive surge of algorithmically produced, low-quality content that clogs online spaces and feels like a waste product of the attention economy. The problem is framed as an authenticity crisis rather than solely a quality or legal issue. Conventional critiques focus on copyright ownership and factual accuracy, addressing mechanics of deception but not the deeper moral violation. The visceral unease toward synthetic condolence notes and fabricated images reflects the mechanization of an appearance-only character type. That character resembles Confucius’s Village Worthy: outwardly correct and pleasing but lacking an inner, authentic self.
Read at Apaonline
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