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sl8

(16,810 posts) Sun Aug 24, 2025, 12:06 PM Aug 24

Snopestionary: AI slop, explained

https://www.snopes.com/articles/470975/ai-slop-media-literacy/

Snopestionary: AI slop, explained

The rise of artificial intelligence tools has left many social media users scrambling to figure out what's real and what isn't.

Jack Izzo
Published Aug. 22, 2025

As artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney began to enter public consciousness, so too did a worrying trend of content called "AI slop," or sometimes just "slop."

Slop is the evolution of spam, in a way. It's low-quality content that's easy to create thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) tools. It can overwhelm social media feeds, leaving users unsure of what's real and what's not. It comes in many forms — posts on social media, of course, but also books on Amazon, music on Spotify, articles from less-than-reliable news outlets (and, unfortunately, some reliable outlets) and even occasionally in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

It's also a genre of content that Snopes has been covering since 2023.

For instance, we have repeatedly checked claims about celebrities supposedly doing good deeds that originated with YouTube videos or Facebook pages that post slop. Former NFL quarterback Peyton Manning was a frequent focus of such stories in June and July 2025.

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Snopestionary: AI slop, explained (Original Post) sl8 Aug 24 OP

I asked Goggle's AI to tell me the difference between AI slop and AI halluicination patphil Aug 24 #1

patphil

(8,236 posts)

1. I asked Goggle's AI to tell me the difference between AI slop and AI halluicination

Reply to sl8 (Original post)

Sun Aug 24, 2025, 01:04 PM

Aug 24

Here's what it said:

"AI hallucinations are specific falsehoods or nonexistent details created by an AI, while AI slop refers to the low-quality, repetitive, and unverified content generated by AI that floods the internet, often including hallucinations. Hallucinations are factual inaccuracies, whereas slop is a broader category of poor-quality output—which may or may not contain specific hallucinations—often produced at scale without human review to generate ad revenue or clicks."

This AI garbage is self-sustaining, and can result in increasingly less reliable information being put forth on the Internet as"fact". One AI's output becomes another AI's input, and the result is more generically known as GIGO.
That's short for Garbage In Garbage Out.
This has always been a problem with computers. AI just institutionalized it.

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