AI Slop Machines

The infinite feed is finally infinite, and it’s eating us alive.

So this is going to lead into a bigger article series on the dead internet, because, if you didn’t already know, it’s dead. Replaced by bots and AI content, never to see the light of day again.

But no, this article isn’t about that (too much to chew on).

This one’s about how, for whatever reason, we as a species decided to build AI slop machines to make the decay even faster.

The rise of the slop

I’m not even joking; in the last month, we’ve had three new “fabulous” inventions. OpenAI released Sora 2, Facebook (sorry, Meta) dropped its shiny new Meta AI app, and Japan went full sci-fi with Loverse, a dating app where you only date AI characters. Not the first either, remember Chai AI? Yeah.

So why on Earth are we being inundated with AI slop right now?

Like, I get it, some of it is genuinely funny. There’s creativity in prompt-building, sure. But the majority of it? The most boring, soulless, frictionless slop I’ve ever had the misfortune of watching.

Have we completely lost our sense of creativity? Why are we now just consumers of entertainment sludge?

When attention died

It used to be different. I remember the good old days of YouTube, when the platform actually incentivised long-form content. When creators pushed the limits of length and storytelling. When videos were events.

But slowly, with the invention of Reels, Shorts, and endless scroll, we’ve just… lost it. Our collective attention span collapsed into a goldfish loop. Everything we “need” to be entertained by now comes in 3-second hits, one after another, on infinite autoplay.

We don’t read anymore. We can barely sit through a feature-length film.

And trust me, I’m in this crowd too. I’ve felt my own brain melt. It’s taken me three separate attempts to finish the Twilight-boy Batman movie. (To be fair, I kept falling asleep.)

Now, scientifically, this is really, really bad. Short-form content feeds constant micro-dopamine spikes and rewards instant task-switching. Our brains are being rewired to prefer shallow novelty, constant, low-effort stimulation. It’s a feedback loop that’s rewiring humanity’s patience out of existence.

And I’m part of the problem. I can see it in my own data. My short-form videos get ten times the reach of anything thoughtful. The algorithm doesn’t reward craft, it rewards velocity. That’s the game now. Speed over substance. Quantity over quality.

It’s not just an issue; it’s an epidemic.

Enter the machines

And that’s where AI comes in, literal slop machines. Anything you could ever want or desire, generated instantly.

We crave short, high-dopamine bursts. AI can now give us exactly that, on demand, at infinite scale. The perfect storm, we built technology perfectly suited to feed our lowest impulses.

Which, frankly, is terrifying.

Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

The problem isn’t just attention spans; it’s that this perfect storm we’ve built will have long-term consequences so big that it could be a case study. (And maybe my future dissertation.)

But that’s not what scares me the most.

The realism problem

What scares me is how good it’s getting, and how I, a literal tech guy, am falling for it. I’m 25, and I can no longer easily tell what’s real or fake.

Sure, a SpongeBob body-cam meme? Obviously fake. But there are videos I’ve seen that looked so real I only noticed they were AI because of a tiny Sora watermark.

That’s insane.

And it’s not just video; tools like Nano Banana now edit photos so cleanly that the only giveaway is the background blur. We’re at a point where figuring out what’s real requires pixel-level forensics.

That’s the scariest part: We’ve already passed the point of no return. We’ve entered an era where the cost of creating a fake is zero, and the cost of verifying truth is massive.

Lies scale. Truth doesn’t.

We can’t trust what we see online anymore, because even we can’t tell what’s fake.

Welcome to the dead internet

We’re already in it.

Bot traffic officially surpassed human traffic back in April this year. Fully. The internet, statistically speaking, now belongs to the machines.

Bot farms exist; industrial operations that manipulate social media, inflate engagement, spread misinformation, and censor dissent. This is happening right now, every day.

Comment sections? Engagement counters? They’ve been fake for years. We just didn’t want to believe it.

And here’s the tinfoil-hat bit (except it’s not even a conspiracy): We have no idea which narratives are being boosted and which are being buried.

China literally rewrote history by erasing Tiananmen Square from its domestic internet. And in the West? We pretend we’re immune; yet Google quietly censors search results around Donald Trump and dementia. (Originally reported by The Verge.)

So yeah. It’s here. Full-force. No fix.

And now we’ve thrown AI-generated video into the mix, content so convincing it’s indistinguishable from reality. We just added fuel to the bonfire.

What do we do?

Honestly? No one’s ready for this.

The machine doesn’t stop, the corporations keep marching forward in the name of “progress.”

At some point, maybe we’ll need a DataKrash (thanks, Rache Bartmoss), wipe the net clean, build a Blackwall, and start from scratch. (Cyberpunk nerds, assemble. Three people will get that reference. Sorry.)

Because right now, we are monumentally cooked when it comes to knowing what’s real. I just want my farm. Fewer feeds, more reality. But it’s getting worse. The internet’s no longer dying, it’s already dead.

The bigger picture

This isn’t just about fake videos or shrinking attention spans. It’s about the collapse of trust.

We’ve handed the internet, the single most powerful information system ever created, to algorithms that optimise for engagement, not truth. When platforms reward quantity over craft, and the fastest wins over the best, you don’t get a creative renaissance, you get infinite slop.

The closing loop

So here we are. Living in the dead internet, bots louder than people, feeds tuned to addiction, reality increasingly negotiable.

Maybe one day we’ll wall the bots off and start fresh. But for now, the only control we have is what we reward. What we click. What we share. What we feed.

Do you feed the slop machine, or do you starve it?

The internet isn’t dying because bots took it over. It’s dying because we gave it to them.

Let’s take back even a little.