The Proliferation of AI-Generated Content in Digital Spaces

The internet has been overrun by AI content. The weirdly glowing and inadvertently surreal airbrushed images, the generic and oddly formal sentences peppered with factual errors and distracting phrases like “as of my last knowledge update.” So much of social media content these days has the unmistakable stench of “AI slop,” hastily spit out by image generators or chatbots to get a few likes. And while the phenomenon might seem harmless or sometimes even charming, the AI slop takeover of the internet is crowding out real information and human perspectives. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Rebecca Jennings, a senior correspondent at Vox, about how AI slop is transforming social media.