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"Your email inbox is full of spam. Your letterbox is full of junk mail. Now, your web browser has its own affliction: slop. "Slop" is what you get when you shove artificial intelligence-generated material up on the web for anyone to view. Unlike a chatbot, the slop isn't interactive, and is rarely intended to actually answer readers' questions or serve their needs. Instead, it functions mostly to create the appearance of human-made content, benefit from advertising revenue and steer search engine attention towards other sites."

"That comment sparked interest and outrage, raising concerns that the kind of AI-generated "slop" that's prominent on Facebook would soon come straight from Meta and disrupt the core utility of social media - fostering human-to-human connection. As users began to sniff out some of Meta's AI accounts this week, the backlash grew, in part because of the way the AI accounts disingenuously described themselves as actual people with racial and sexual identities."

"Put more simply? We're in the midst of a digital slopaggedon, with the felt everyday impacts ranging from mild irritants like graphs about "uncoked kermelss" to more serious information erosions - the replacing of images of famous artworks and historical events with AI-generated fakes, for example, or the flooding of social media with fake AI-generated imagery during environmental disasters."

"Users who once came to Facebook to connect with friends and family are increasingly complaining of random, spammy, junk content - much of it apparently generated by artificial intelligence - showing up in their feeds. Sometimes it's obviously fake, AI-generated images, like the now-infamous "Shrimp Jesus." Other times, it's old posts from real creators that look like they're being reshared by bot accounts for engagement. In some cases, it's pages sharing streams of seemingly benign but random content - memes or movie clips, shared every few hours."