AI slop
You might remember it as Shrimp Jesus
Content generated by AI that is seen as lacking effort, quality or meaning, usually mass-produced for money or attention
2024·Short-form and streams·informative
The word the internet found for what happened when making content stopped costing anything.
At a glanceThe facts
- Remembered as
- slop
- Spread in
- 2024
- Format
- Phenomenon
- What it said
- Content generated by AI that is seen as lacking effort, quality or meaning, usually mass-produced for money or attention
- Origin
- No single original
- Available
- Not held by ViralWorld
What this wasThe story
Machine-generated images, articles, videos and music produced in enormous volume for the attention economy: a shrimp fused with Jesus, an old woman beside a hundred-and-twenty-second birthday cake, a wooden sculpture that could not exist, each captioned with a plea for engagement. The style is recognisable — smooth, plausible, weightless — and the point is quantity.
The argument it started is unresolved and probably central to the next decade of the web: whether platforms can or will distinguish machine output from human output, whether they have any incentive to, and what an archive like this one should do when most of what is published is nobody's work.
Why it matteredWhat changed
It is the word people settled on for machine-made content nobody asked for, named word of the year for 2025 by Merriam-Webster and by the American Dialect Society.
TimelineIn order
- Made
The science-fiction magazine Clarkesworld closes to submissions after a flood of machine-written stories.1
- Took off
Simon Willison promotes “slop” on his blog as the word for unwanted AI content.1
- Later
Thousands of people gather in Dublin for a Halloween parade that had been listed on a website and did not exist.1
- Mainstream
Coca-Cola’s AI-generated Christmas advertisements are widely criticised.1
- Record
The American Dialect Society names “slop” its word of the year for 2025, as Merriam-Webster had.1
What people misrememberSet straight
Commonly remembered asSimon Willison coined the term.
ActuallyHe says it was in use long before he wrote about it.1
How it spreadFrom one place to everywhere
- AI-generated pictures of Jesus made of shrimp circulated widely on Facebook in 2024.1
Why it is here: something the internet still knows by name · a moment that changed what the internet did next · it got out of its own corner of the internet fast
Where it came fromWhat we know
This spread through many posts rather than one identifiable original. The example shown is one surviving copy and is not claimed as the first.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first version of this. It spread through many posts rather than from one identifiable original.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
SourcesWhat was read
Sources last read on . That date is about the history on this page. Whether the media still plays is checked separately and can change any day. How ViralWorld documents things