AI Slop is Polluting the Internet

Every morning the web feels a little emptier. You scroll, you search, you skim—and everything starts to sound the same. Smooth sentences, polished grammar, zero pulse. Perfectly competent writing that leaves you with nothing.

That’s the texture of the modern internet: shiny words, hollow meaning.

Welcome to the slop era.

When Machines Took the Keyboard

Bad writing isn’t new. Clickbait and SEO mills have been choking Google for years. What changed is speed. One person with a laptop and a prompt can now produce a mountain of articles before lunch. Entire “publications” exist with no staff, no sources, no editors—just output.

And the system rewards it. Platforms value clicks over craft. Search engines still think quantity equals quality. Advertisers just want a page to load, not a soul behind it. The result? A firehose of text that looks nutritious until you taste it.

It’s intellectual junk food—mass-produced, calorie-free, engineered to hit the same mental sugar receptors over and over.

Why It Matters

You could shrug and say, “Who cares? So what if a few travel blogs are fake?” But the rot spreads.

Search collapses. When half of page one is synthetic filler, finding real insight becomes work.

Trust breaks down. After enough shallow garbage, readers stop believing even the good stuff.

Creativity suffocates. The person who actually went somewhere, noticed something, or thought deeply gets drowned out by a thousand remixed summaries.

Knowledge decays. AI is now training on its own leftovers—a feedback loop of mediocrity feeding itself thinner every cycle. Machines eating their own vomit.

This isn’t harmless clutter. It’s pollution.

How to Smell the Slop

Once you tune in, you’ll spot it instantly.

It’s too clean.

Grammar perfect, rhythm identical.

It’s vague. Every city is “vibrant,” every company “innovative. ”

It’s circular. Ideas repeat like bad radio jingles.

It’s careless. Facts float unverified; quotes appear from nowhere.

Read enough of it and you start craving the mess of a real human voice—the uneven edges, the fingerprints.

Not All Machines Are the Enemy

Let’s be fair. AI itself isn’t evil. Used right, it’s a drafting tool, a translator, a thought partner. The slop happens when people hand it the whole job and walk away.

There’s a line between using AI as a co-pilot and letting it fly the plane blindfolded.

Pushing Back

If we want to save the web, three things have to change:

Platforms need to stop paying out on volume. Reward originality, not noise.

Creators need to show their receipts. Tell us when a machine helped—and when you did the real work.

Readers need to stop clicking sludge. Attention is currency; spend it like it matters.

The Bigger Story

The threat isn’t that AI will out-create us. It’s that it will bury us under repetition. These systems don’t innovate; they recycle. They live off our collective imagination, thinning it with every spin of the wheel.

We’ve been here before—spam emails, click farms, listicles dressed as journalism. Each time, the internet eventually fought back. We built filters, raised standards, and learned not to fall for the bait.

Now it’s time again.

The Choice

The web doesn’t have to rot. It can still surprise us, move us, teach us something true. But that only happens if humans stay loud—if we keep caring enough to write, read, and demand better.

Because slop doesn’t conquer us by force. It wins when we stop noticing.