What’s AI ‘slop’ — and why were we served more of it in 2025?
Ontario tech expert explains why more ‘slop’ was served up on our social feeds.
By Janis Ramsay // Published January 5, 2026
Artificial intelligence (AI) has advanced significantly over the last year — and it’s why we’re seeing more AI “slop” being served up on our social media feeds.
Ontario-based tech educator and author Avery Swartz explains that, just like low-quality, frequently sent emails are called spam, the AI equivalent is called “slop.”
“It makes me think of a mixture of different foods that you’d feed the pigs,” she said.
What is slop?
Just like the name entails, slop is a mishmash of AI-generated content, usually shared by people on their social media feed.
It includes talking cats, propaganda videos, fake news that looks real and some Hollywood entertainment news you may wish was real.
Slop was actually been named as Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2025.
“We define slop as ‘digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.’ All that stuff dumped on our screens, captured in just four letters: the English language came through again,” Merriam-Webster said on its website.
“Like slime, sludge and muck, slop has the wet sound of something you don’t want to touch,” Merriam-Webster added. “Slop oozes into everything.”
The original sense of the word from the 1700s was soft mud.
In the 1800s, it came to mean food waste and then, more generally, rubbish or a product of little or no value.
Now, the word has moved into the future, as it references AI trash flooding our feeds — and getting harder to detect.
AI content more widely available for people to create
Partly to blame for the proliferation of AI slop is the easy-to-use, and more widespread use, of AI tools to create photos or videos. It is not just for computer programmers or image-editing experts anymore.
Swartz said various companies, like Midjourney, upped the game when it comes to image generation.
“In April of 2025, there was a big improvement to the way images are made inside ChatGPT,” Swartz told Metroland Media.
But the biggest player in the image-generating software space is one inside Google Gemini.
“Before it launched, the people who worked at Google had a code name for it. They called it nano banana. That update made it so anybody who has a Google Gemini account — which is millions of people — can generate extremely realistic AI images and you will not be able to tell they’re fake. They look 100 per cent real.”
AI-generated videos arrive
Video is the next evolution.
“For quite a while, AI-generated video was poor and you kinda could tell (it was fake). But same thing, the technology is on an exponential growth curve,” Swartz said.
Computer-generated videos have the right movement in the background if it’s a windy day, or ripples in the water, for example.
And even people with no technical background can create them.
“Again, Google Gemini is one of the leaders in this space for being able to create realistic AI-generated video. And then OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has a video generator, called Sora.”
The app version was released just over a month ago.
“They actually encouraged people to create selfie videos. They said it would be like its own social media platform. They wanted you to go on there and make videos,” Swartz said.
What’s happening is users are taking Sora videos and uploading them onto Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and X.
Sometimes, they are watermarked with a Sora icon — so you can tell it’s fake, Swartz said.
But the problem is, once you click on one video to watch it, social media offers up more.
Why am I seeing so much slop?
Part of the reason you are seeing more AI-generated content on your feed is that it is cheap, easy to make and grabs your attention.
Either because they are cute or you feel enraged, you’re likely to share them.
In fact, Oxford selected “rage bait” as its word of the year. Rage bait is online slang that refers to any commentary or content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative or offensive.
What’s being done about all this slop?
Although Meta — Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Instagram’s parent company — said in April it was cracking down on spam content, it didn’t apply to AI-generated content.
So even if you don’t follow spam-sharing accounts on social media, you will still see ads or posts featuring slop.
Slop videos aren’t all just cute, innocuous videos — they can be created for a real-world news event.
“Often you see AI slop now around natural disasters,” Swartz said. “There was a terrible hurricane that hit Jamaica a couple of (months) ago, and I started seeing alleged images and video from the hurricane.”
Some videos shared on X even showed images of sharks swimming along the streets. It looked believable. But readers flagged the video, so a note was added to share it is a generated video.
Overall, Swartz cautions people to pause before sharing more AI-generated images or videos.