What is slop?
It's time for a literary theory of slop.
A Literary Theory of Slop
I’ve rarely seen a tech product met with such universal disgust as Meta’s “Vibes” app, which—at least in my corner of the internet—was immediately written off as an infinite slop machine. While I don’t know if the content on Vibes will be categorically worse than the brainrot that already exists on TikTok, Reels, or YouTube Shorts, it is part of a larger and concerning trend: meaningless but attention-grabbing content that fills our feeds on nearly every platform.
Slop takes many forms: LinkedIn posts that follow nauseating formulas to bait engagement. Instagram Reels featuring kittens in ice cream cones and an uncanny, magical veneer. Slop is everywhere, and usually we can name it when we see it (though some are better at spotting it than others). It’s widespread enough that we need to define it and understand our revulsion to it. We need a literary theory of slop.
My current working theory of slop is this: it means nothing, or very little, to the creator. If the creator puts only minimal care, taste, or judgment into the thing’s creation, it is slop. The creator may care about the indirect or end result–such as followers, engagement, or money–but has no attachment to the substance itself. Slop may even have no creator at all if it was merely generated by randomized prompts, which is now possible.
Slop is shallow. Slop is thin. Slop does not come from a spark of insight or an aching soul. Slop is not a vessel for meaning. It does not inspire growth or understanding or emotion in its audience. Slop is vampiric, sucking away attention and energy into its void.
This is not to say that anything AI touches is slop, or that anything purely human is non-slop. (I’m sure many of us have created our own version of slop, pre-AI, when we wrote an essay 30 minutes before a midnight deadline.)
Slop, I think, is a sliding scale, rather than binary. The degree to which something is slop is inversely proportional to the degree of care and meaning put into it by its creator. Notice I don’t say effort. A carpenter might use an electric sander rather than manual sandpaper to make a rocking chair for his grandmother, and it would not necessarily degrade the care and meaning put into it. Reduced effort produces slop only when it is coupled with reduced care and meaning.
In the hands of a dedicated creator or artist, AI can be used to amplify a vision or explore creative possibilities very efficiently. And in writing, AI is useful for producing text that is clear, explanatory, and correct-sounding. But the more AI is used to offload the creation of meaning, the more the output tends towards slop.
Back in August, computer scientist Andrej Karpathy made a post on X praising Tolkien’s body of work—its depth, its obsessive attention to detail, its richness—and asking whether AI could ever be used to create a work of such caliber, culminating in the question “what is slop?”
Through the lens of my theory of slop, Tolkien’s work is the antithesis of slop. He went beyond what most creators would deem sane to assign rich meaning to even the smallest details in the world he imagined. He wrote Bible-like histories and invented entire languages. He thought deeply about the sound of words and famously found beauty in the otherwise mundane phrase “cellar door.”
My answer to Karpathy’s question, therefore, is that a Tolkien-esque AI-produced work would be slop. This is similar to the view, expressed by Will Manidis, that craft is the antidote to slop. Tolkien’s body of work is the height of literary craft, full of care and meaning.
These thoughts represent an early framework. Before my three-year-old son was born, AI-generated slop did not exist. Now it does, and it is inescapable. We need a theory of slop to disarm it, defang it, and avoid its vampiricism if we want to.