We’re drowning in AI slop online. According to a recent Guardian article, as many as a fifth of the videos generated by algorithm for new users of YouTube are low-grade drivel placed there to garner more views.
Have you noticed how bad Google searches have become? I’m wondering if I fantasised a Golden Age when most of what I was looking for was on the first page of search results. Something very bad is happening, and AI is the driver.
“Brain rot” was the Oxford word of the year in 2024, “rage bait” in 2025. My money’s on “AI slop” this year. Too much time swilling around in this sort of polluted gush of semi-meaningful material is taking its toll on many of us, and we’re suffering. There are signs of decay.
In philosophy it’s not just unreliable LLM-delivered summaries that are causing problems, there are self-declared philosophy influencers out there giving ever simpler introductions to key ideas of great thinkers. Some of them seem to be using AI to write their scripts. How else could they be so bad?
They don’t seem to realise what a travesty this is, or how many misreadings they are engendering. I suspect they’re just there for the clicks. And, sadly, they’re getting millions.
Cory Doctorow, the sci-fi novelist and commentator on all things tech, has coined the word “enshittification” to describe what’s happening more generally. Good term; nasty phenomenon. He sees a three-stage process at work with online platforms.
In Stage One a platform (and his favourite example is Facebook) is good to its users, but at the same time draws them in. The platform becomes indispensable to them, and there are no obvious alternatives.
In Stage Two, things get better for business customers, but much worse for ordinary users, who are mostly too committed to leave.
In Stage Three, the owners make things bad for everyone, business customers and ordinary people alike, as they extract value from these two groups of locked-in users.
Doctorow is not a fatalist about this: he does think we can escape this sort of decline – one way is via anti-trust/anti-monopoly legislation. But much of the internet, like our rivers, is heavily polluted with, well, shit. And it’s affecting our minds. Tech innovations were good, and now many of them aren’t.
Is this fearmongering, or is it really happening? Is it going to get even worse? Will we drown in this slop?
There are analogies with the great horse manure crisis of 1894. In the Victorian era there were a lot of horses in London, and they defecated in the streets – they had no choice. According to many internet sources, the Times of London included the estimate that every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure within 50 years.
A startling claim, except that no one has been able to find that article in that newspaper, not even the paper’s archivist. The claim that it was there (a claim that pops up repeatedly if you search “horse manure crisis of 1894”) was itself a piece of horseshit, one produced before the advent of LLMs – real fake news.
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Some people in the late 19th century were indeed genuinely worried about the amount of manure on the streets, though. Horse manure did cause health problems. But the widespread use of motorised trams, buses, and cars soon changed things completely. Manure was no longer the threat – it was superseded by exhaust pollution.
Today the horse manure crisis of 1894 is taken as a moral tale – a supposedly reassuring one. In 1894 few people foresaw the solution to the problem, but there was a tech-driven one coming down the line. Henry Ford et al solved it. London was never buried. The moral is supposed to be that we shouldn’t despair about apparently insurmountable difficulties because some clever inventor will get us out of the pickle.
Perhaps this will happen with AI-generated slop. No doubt someone is hard at work writing code for a killer anti-slop device. Perhaps a Cat in the (White) Hat is out there developing a wonderful app that will clean up the mess before we go under. I’d download it in a shot.
But perhaps this won’t happen. If Doctorow is right, the tech companies have strong incentives to move in the opposite direction. They’ve got us trapped and they don’t care that we’ve only just got our heads above the rivers of shit they’re flooding our lives with.
That’s our problem, not theirs. Welcome to 2026.
