Why does AI have such bad taste? How AI systems are flooding social media with slop
In recent times, criticism of the use of artificial intelligence to create promotional graphics and other visual content has multiplied online. At the heart of the debate is also a certain nostalgia for a particular form of vernacular graphic design — that collection of amateur, popular solutions often far removed from professional standards, yet authentic precisely because of that. The massive use of AI risks replacing this rough-and-ready but genuine graphic tradition with a serial production of cheap, repetitive content.
Starting in 2024, the English term slop began to spread as a way of describing this type of content, used disparagingly to refer to the cheap, absurd, derivative, and tasteless images and videos created with AI — or at least those generated using default settings. The phenomenon has become so widespread that the English dictionary Merriam-Webster chose "slop" as its word of the year for 2025.
What defines typical AI slop
Despite advances in artificial intelligence systems having made it possible to produce increasingly realistic and sophisticated images and videos, identifying AI-generated content often remains relatively straightforward, due to certain recurring traits: an excessively polished aesthetic, an overall cleanliness to the image, and a generally harmonious arrangement of elements, which can give the final result an appearance that is even vaguely unsettling.
For some years now, researchers and experts in design and visual culture have been questioning the effects that continuous exposure to standardised, mass-produced artificial intelligence content could have on people's aesthetic taste. The problem is that images and graphics clearly generated with AI are often not necessarily perceived as garish and cheap by users — a phenomenon that, however difficult to quantify precisely, appears to have become widespread across different sectors, platforms, and audience segments.
Why social networks are full of slop
The growing presence of slop on social networks is tied to the dynamics governing the production and distribution of content on platforms. On Instagram and TikTok, competition to capture users' attention, combined with monetisation systems that incentivise creators to publish large quantities of videos, is driving the production of increasingly cheap content — also because, as the New York Times points out, the most popular clips have often been found to be blatantly AI-made, without meeting any standard of realism.
Amid all this, a debate is also underway about the use of AI by large companies to generate visual content, with regard to the consequences that these forms of automation can have on the work of creative studios, freelance designers, and illustrators, among others. According to the most vocal critics, entrusting the creation of graphics and visual solutions to artificial intelligence reduces the need for the design expertise of industry professionals, without necessarily achieving a better result. For this reason, when Coca-Cola, for instance, used AI to produce some of its advertisements, the online backlash was enormous.