How AI slop is clogging your brain

How AI slop is clogging your brain

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/08/nx-s1-5528762/ai-slop-attention-economy

September 8, 20253:00 AM ET

By Alexis Williams

Bizarre videos, uncanny photos, and Luigi Mangoine’s likeness on Shein … ? “AI slop” is taking over the web. It’s putting money in people’s pockets, and driving them offline, too.

This is AI + U. Each Monday this month, host Brittany Luse explores how we’re already seeing the impacts of AI. Artificial Intelligence has become a constant in ways we can and can’t see … and for the next few weeks we’re zeroing in on how AI affects our daily lives.

Brittany chats with Washington Post tech reporter Drew Harwell and freelance environment writer Emma Marris about the limits of AI creativity and what this “slop” is doing to us on and offline.

Episode highlights

The “AI slop” side hustle economy is booming

DREW: The people I talked to, these are people who are, you know, middle class who have kind of like side jobs or who are college students and saw this as like a thing they could do at night to make a couple bucks. And some of them were surprised at how much money they were making from this.

The dependence on AI may keep us stuck in the past

EMMA: The other thing to keep in mind, too, is that these models are all trained on, you know, a bunch of stuff that came before.

So they don’t really have the ability to produce something genuinely new.

Like, if you were trying to come up with like a new visual style or like a new literary form, it wouldn’t be able to do that on its own because all it can do is sort of remix what it’s already been fed. So I mean, my concern is that in creative fields or even product design, if people lean too heavily on these tools, then we will sort of see culture spin its wheels and not really come up with really new stuff, just kind of remixing. We don’t have a new vision for the future. We’re just going to talk about the past.

“AI slop” may have bigger implications than we realize

EMMA: There’s been some interesting studies on how AI can be used and is already being used for like serious propaganda efforts, you know, like state sponsored stuff. And I’ve heard the term “AI pasta” thrown around.

So there’s this Internet idea of “copypasta” where you just cut and paste some text and you repost it so many times that eventually it just kind of oozes into people’s consciousness. But with AI, you can rephrase it a whole bunch of different ways or make slightly different versions of the same image or the same video. And as people see it more and more times, they’ll just sort of eventually come to accept it as part of reality. So it can be a really effective way to convince people of stuff that’s not true for bad actors.

DREW: You use it because … I’m a bald white guy, so I can say this … if I want to make all bald white guys look stupid or look like they all believe the same thing, or they all do the same thing that people find distasteful, I can just make the AI create a very realistic, lifelike video of them doing that. And apply that to whatever group you want to, right? And so, you know, in the past and current day, you’ll watch videos that will upset you and you’re like, is this real? Is this a joke? Is this a prank? Is this like somebody just being an influencer? And now you extract that to AI, where you don’t even need a film crew, you don’t even need an actor. You can just do that from your phone through an AI in a way that nobody would be able to tell. So I think that’s yeah, the state propaganda point is a really good one because you can see how a bad actor with enough incentive, with enough time, with the initiative, can make people believe and mask something they may otherwise not believe. And when you have AI, it’s like a force multiplier to the points you want to make. And you can use the AI to sort of put out those messages in that propaganda you agree with.

EMMA: I mean, it doesn’t solve the problem of this, but you as an individual can always choose not to give your attention to this stuff. Like that’s the point of my story, is that when the Internet gives you slop, you can decide to just spend less time on the Internet, you know? And there’s something really freeing about just taking back some of your attention and time and just walking around, like, unmonetized. Like, it feels good to not be a profit center all day, every day.