When Stick Figure's six-year-old song shot up the charts, the band was thrilled. But its viral moment was spurred by unauthorized AI remixes. The California-based reggae band Stick Figure has been around for 20 years, eight albums, and countless hours on the road, but lead vocalist and guitarist Scott Woodruff has never seen a track take off like "Angels Above Me" did this past week. The six-year-old song hit number one on the iTunes sales charts in six different countries, including the United Kingdom, Austria, and Canada, skyrocketing "out of nowhere," according to Woodruff. Stick Figure has had plenty of thrilling milestones before, with albums repeatedly hitting number one in the reggae category, and hit singles amassing hundreds of millions of streams.

AI'slop' is transforming social media - and a backlash is brewing Théodore remembers the AI slop that tipped him over the edge. The image was of two emaciated, impoverished South Asian children. For some reason, despite their boyish features they have thick beards. One of them had no hands and only one foot. The other was holding a sign saying it's his birthday and asking for likes.

PCWorld reports that ChatGPT 5.2 is now indexing Grokipedia, xAI's AI-generated encyclopedia known for inaccuracies and conspiracy theories. This creates a concerning feedback loop where AI-generated misinformation spreads between major language models, potentially overwriting established knowledge. The integration poses significant risks to information integrity as biased or false content from one AI system influences another's responses. More and more of the web is filling up with LLM-generated text, images, and even videos and music . It's an even bigger problem than it seems because the "AI" systems that have scoured the web to generate their large language models are now .

If I were to locate the moment AI slop broke through into popular consciousness, I'd pick the video of rabbits bouncing on a trampoline that went viral last summer. For many savvy internet users, myself included, it was the first time we were fooled by an AI video, and it ended up spawning a wave of almost identical generated clips. My first reaction was that, broadly speaking, all of this sucked. That's become a familiar refrain, in think pieces and at dinner parties. Everything online is slop now--the internet "enshittified," with AI taking much of the blame. But then friends started sharing AI clips in group chats that were compellingly weird, or funny.

The vast datacentres required are so expensive that many are financed by debt secured against future revenue. The vast datacentres required are so expensive that many are financed by debt secured against future revenue. Sun 4 Jan 2026 07.18 ESTLast modified on Sun 4 Jan 2026 08.47 EST The US dictionary Merriam-Websterâ s word of the year for 2025 was â slopâ, which it defines as â digital content of low quality that is produced, usually in quantity, by means of artificial intelligenceâ . The choice underlined the fact that while AI is being widely embraced, not least by corporate bosses keen to cut payroll costs, its downsides are also becoming obvious. In 2026, a reckoning with reality for AI represents a growing economic risk.

Clockwise from top left: Shrimp Jesus, Nayib Bukele, Justin Bieber and Super Cat League. Clockwise from top left: Shrimp Jesus, Nayib Bukele, Justin Bieber and Super Cat League. In the algorithm-driven economy of 2025, one man's shrimp Jesus is another man's side hustle. AI slop - the low-quality, surreal content flooding social media platforms, designed to farm views - is a phenomenon, some would say the phenomenon of the 2024 and 2025 internet. Merriam-Webster's word of the year this year is "slop", referring exclusively to the internet variety.

A surge of AI-generated content is frustrating Pinterest users and left some questioning whether the platform still works at all. For five years, Caitlyn Jones has used Pinterest on a weekly basis to find recipes for her son. In September, Jones spotted a creamy chicken and broccoli slow-cooker recipe, sprinkled with golden cheddar and a pop of parsley. She quickly looked at the ingredients and added them to her grocery list. But just as she was about to start cooking, having already bought everything, one thing stood out: The recipe told her to start by "logging" the chicken into the slow cooker.

Speaking with popular AI content creators convinces me that "slop" isn't just the internet rotting in real time, but the early draft of a new kind of pop culture. Lately, everywhere I scroll, I keep seeing the same fish-eyed CCTV view: a grainy wide shot from the corner of a living room, a driveway at night, an empty grocery store. JD Vance shows up at the doorstep in a crazy outfit. A car folds into itself like paper and drives away. A cat comes in and starts hanging out with capybaras and bears, as if in some weird modern fairy tale. This fake-surveillance look has become one of the signature flavors of what people now call AI slop. For those of us who spend time online watching short videos, slop feels inescapable: a flood of repetitive, often nonsensical AI-generated clips that washes across TikTok, Instagram, and beyond. For that, you can thank new tools like OpenAI's Sora (which exploded in popularity after launching in app form in September), Google's Veo series, and AI models built by Runway. Now anyone can make videos, with just a few taps on a screen.

Reddit is considered one of the most human spaces left on the internet, but mods and users are overwhelmed with slop posts in the most popular subreddits. A Reddit post about a bride who demands a wedding guest wear a specific, unflattering shade is sure to provoke rage, let alone one about a bridesmaid or mother of the groom who wants to wear white. A scenario where a parent asks someone on an airplane to switch seats so they can sit next to their young child is likely to invoke the same rush of anger. But those posts may trigger a Reddit moderator's annoyance for a different reason--they are common themes within a growing genre of AI -generated, fake posts. These are examples that spring to mind for Cassie, one of dozens of moderators for r/AmItheAsshole .

Slop Evader isn't meant as a solution, but it gives a temporary reprieve. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A sizable portion of the internet has devolved into an AI-contaminated wasteland . While an easy solution remains elusive, a browser extension called Slop Evader offers a glimpse at what the internet to be only a few short years ago. While always prone to innumerable hazards, the online ecosystem is degrading largely due to the misuse of generative artificial intelligence content .