Lost in the slop layer

One of the more perplexing things about the AI bubble is how relatively little we have to show for it. Mostly, it’s chatbots, some coding automation, and slop. A lot of slop.

You can spend hours reading through eye-popping Nividia earnings reports and lengthy columns expounding on the transformative powers of the technology and analysts’ takes on what may be the biggest bubble of our generation. That’s to say nothing of the breathless proclamations of tech executives, of course, or the federal government’s own enthusiastic overtures. But then you flip on Saturday Night Live and the first sketch they run after the monologue reminds you that a lot of the general public’s experience of AI is actually more like the one depicted here:

That is, as slop. Encountering awful AI slop (and startups with skin-crawling pitches like ‘what if we use AI to reanimate dead family members’), is an experience universal enough that Glen Powell acting out Sora-esque output gets top billing at SNL. Slop has broken through; slop is everywhere; slop is mainstream.

And it’s not just that everyone, regardless of demographic, has watched a discomfiting AI-generated video or heard about a bad AI startup. AI slop is on TV ads, it’s in video games, it’s on the pop charts. There is a tangible, tactile, and unavoidable slop layer that has encrusted pop culture and much of modern life.

If the slop explosion began in earnest in 2023, with the unleashing of ChatGPT and Midjourney, and it reached critical mass in 2024, then now, in 2025, we’re seeing that slop hardening into the outer shells of our cultural institutions and social spheres, like a layer of so much automata-inflected sedimentary rock. And I’m not one to pass up a metaphor, so let’s go all in why don’t we. Remember middle school geology? The US Geological Survey notes that sedimentary rock is “formed from pre-existing rocks or,” like slop, “pieces of once-living organisms.” The USGS also helpfully notes that sedimentary rocks have “distinctive layering or bedding.” You know it when you see it.

Now, in 2025, whenever we go to read a blog, flip on the TV, stream music, or pick up a PS5 controller, we are likely to encounter the slop layer. This agglomeration of content living and dead, marked by a faintly unpleasant aesthetic homogeneity, that evokes in us a weary inability to discern what’s real and ...