The year that Slop took over the internet.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

The internet has been overrun by AI content.

The weirdly glowing and inadvertently surreal airbrushed images.

The generic and oddly formal sentences,

peppered with factual errors and distracting phrases,

like, as of my last knowledge update.

So much of social media content these days has the unmistakable stench of AI Slop,

hastily spit out by image generators or chatbots to get a few likes.

And while the phenomenon might seem harmless or sometimes even charming,

the AI Slop takeover of the internet is crowding out real information and human perspectives.

According to Rebecca Jennings, a senior correspondent at Vox, who recently wrote about how AI Slop is transforming social media.

So I first started seeing it on Twitter slash X.

It was pictures that looked like it could have been in Edinburgh.

So this one in particular was, it was like a view out of a cafe window and it was very like moody kind of rainy street with like string lights atop and a church in the distance.

It was very pretty.

And then you like kind of look at it for like one second longer. And you're like, why is the table wet? And why are, is there like a

chunk of broccoli maybe in the teacup? And what is that beige liquid in the milk jar? And why are there

4,000 kinds of bread on the table? It's just like very bizarre and kind of

inexplicable and like in what world would that actually be a real photo, even though when

you first look at it, it's like, oh, that looks really pretty. You also write about things like, say,

...