Eating Slop; Consuming (AI) Slop
Our junk food diets have formed us into willing consumers of AI slop
Out of all the thousands upon thousands of words in the English language, slop was surely among the least likely candidates to become popular in our modern era. Its ascendancy, however, has been nothing but extraordinary. It has even reached the prestigious height of being crowned Word of the Year 2025.1 Quite the achievement for a word that describes the semi-liquid gloop of wasted food we feed to pigs.
But before agrarians get excited that the widespread use of the word slop may mean a back garden revival in livestock rearing is afoot, it must be noted that animal feed is not the reason why slop became Word of the Year. Slop has acquired another meaning in recent years; a meaning that doesn’t describe something we feed to livestock but rather one that describes something crass and ugly that human beings are consuming with a ferocity that puts the most gluttonous pig to shame.
The kind of slop that won Word of the Year cannot have escaped your attention if you are someone who is even remotely online. And if you are a user of social media, well, you will have been subjected to a tsunami-like deluge of it. These sites have become saturated with crass, low-quality, mass-produced, and somewhat absurd images, videos, and short-form text, most of it produced by Artificial “Intelligence”. This “AI slop”, churned out by bots, click-bait merchants, SEO manipulators, and bored teenagers, is the slop we are awash with, and is what many members of our society — both young and old — can’t consume enough of. One only has to glance at how many times this trash is shared and goes viral to realise the depths of the miry clay that we are sinking in.
There is obviously a substantial market for AI slop. Otherwise, those investing significant amounts of energy and time to constantly create it would quickly realise their folly. These slop merchants are, however, being richly rewarded through clicks, shares, subscriptions, and revenue sharing. The hyper online among us (and if we care to admit it, even the moderately online among us too) have developed an insatiable appetite for slop — and slop in abundance is what they get. Wallowing in the trivial mires of AI slop, their dopamine receptors couldn’t be happier — and neither could the slop merchants.
That a sizeable and growing proportion of our society possess an appetite for slop is indicative of at least three closely connected features of modern man. First, our lives have become so trivial and hollow that we are content to fill them with slop. Second, we really are pretty defenceless against addiction. Third and finally, we have become desensitised to, and perhaps even bored with, the natural and profound beauty that surrounds us all. We would rather look at a stream of obviously fake, multi-coloured “cute” bird images on our phones than take the time to consider the real-life birds singing outside our window. This is a tragedy. But a lucrative tragedy to tech giants and slop merchants alike.
Our debased appetites and hollow, shallow lives have not been formed out of nowhere. Essays upon essays could be written about the myriad factors which have contributed to our appetites and attention spans becoming debased. However, I wish to focus here upon a factor that may not be considered an obvious candidate but is it one which I am convinced has laid the groundwork for our appetites to be captured by AI slop. I strongly believe the type of food we have been consuming for the last hundred or so years (and more so in the last thirty) has shaped and formed us into the kind of passive consumers who desire and even demand a visual cornucopia of AI slop.
The diet of the average modern man has become industrially ultra-processed. Preservative and additive laden foods, packaged in brightly coloured plastic, and made with copious amounts of sugar, fat, salt, and modified starch is what many of us consume in vast and frictionless quantities. Our diets have shifted from the predominantly seasonal, fresh, local, and nutritiously diverse diets of our ancestors to the industrially engineered diets of the modern food system. As Wendell Berry says in his essay The Pleasures of Eating, this kind of engineered “food” is what we have been persuaded to eat through a relentless barrage of adverts, subsidies, and peer pressure. Much of this perverse persuasion has worked subconsciously upon our appetites, moulding us into the obedient and profitable consumers the industrial food producers want us to be.
We are addicted to the stuff; enamoured with its artificial, sugary, and salty flavours and dependent upon its convenience and frictionlessness. And like anyone who is addicted to anything, our bodies and minds are suffering. This food, though relatively harmless when consumed as the occasional treat or in moderation, is the opposite of healthy when consumed in the vast quantities we are apt to consume. The prevalence of obesity and type-2 diabetes should have told us this long ago. But, like the obedient consumers that we are, we go on consuming regardless because we are addicted and enslaved by our industrially influenced and artificial desires.
If we sat down and considered what exactly it is that we are eating — breaking the ultra-processed foods down into their constituent (often chemical) parts and then considering how unethically the actual “food” parts of what we eat were grown and reared — I believe we would be rightly appalled. Our ultra-processed diets would look like the slop and junk that they are. As an example, consider how devoid energy drinks are of anything that remotely resembles goodness and health. This exercise of reflection, however, is the last thing the industrial food system wants us to do. It labours hard to keep us ignorant of its production methods and strives, through cleaver and manipulative marketing, to present the food we are consuming as desirable, safe, and perfect.
This, Berry argues, is another crucial and perverse attribute of industrial food: it is too “perfect”. Any images of such food that we see on packaging and adverts are airbrushed and embellished like a supermodel to give it a “virgin purity”. And when we actually hold the food in our hands, we will find the standardised and mechanised methods of industrial production it has been made under ensure that each item of ultra-processed food we buy in the supermarket looks the same, tastes the same, smells the same and conforms to the ultra-standards of perfection we have come to expect. The trick of the industrial food system is to make what is slop not look like slop at all. Instead, it looks like perfection. Sugar coating and brightly coloured packaging can cover a multitude of culinary sins.
My argument thus far has been that we have become addicted to consuming ultra-processed junk food slop. That is all well and good, but how does this all relate to our propensity to consume AI slop? In many, many ways. But let me just outline a few.
We have become accustomed to living frictionless lives — especially so in terms of our pleasures. It is easy and now instinctive for us to reach for a bag of sweets or crisps or to put the salty ready meal in the microwave — and in a few mere seconds we experience immediate pleasure and (short-term) satisfaction of our hunger. The frictionlessness of our lives and diets has become so extreme that what Berry predicted all those years ago has become true: the industrial food industry has found a way of supplying us with food we don’t even have to chew. They are called protein shakes.
Having been thus conditioned for frictionlessness by our diets, when the visual and cognitive pleasures dispensed by our screens and the unlimited streams of AI slop came along, we found them irresistible. The tech giants found to their delight that the industrial food system had pre-prepared and conditioned our minds to limitlessly consume their frictionless content (slop). All they had to do was let the flood gates open.
Our bodies crave instant gratification, and the sugar highs and lows we experience from the junk food exacerbate this. Much easier to pick up the phone than go outside to see wildlife (which requires us to expend energy). Much easier to scroll through AI slop than enjoy a good book. When we want to be entertained, we throw patience and effort to the wind and instantly pick up our mobile slop dispensers and scroll the hours away — alongside a packet of crisps or two.
We have come to expect and demand perfection and standardisation. We demand our food to be perfect, bleimishless, uniform, and predictable; we wish for our entertainments to be likewise. Ever thought why it used to be a trustworthy indicator that an image was produced by AI if it looked overly flawless and perfect? It is because AI was merely reproducing our own desires and expectations, producing the kind of flawless human faces, blemishes foods, and perfect houses that we desire to have. Of course this is what AI would end up producing, it had been trained to deliver such perfection — and perfection is what we crave. When slop doesn’t look like slop, or when it deceives us by looking authentic, we can consume it without shame.
We have become used to seeing the bright colours, catchy slogans, and cartoon images of ultra-processed packaging. And now, we are served this same aesthetic en masse by AI slop. “Cute” cartoons, vibrant colours, fast moving images, bright lights, short, catchy text — AI slop is awash with this. And we love it.
We have become addicted to modified, unnatural, and processed foods, and have likewise become enamoured with fake, inauthentic and sensationalist videos, trivial media, and AI-nonsense. We laugh at the absurd mismatch of animals (e.g. a crocodile with a head of a chicken); are duped by the “video” of the brave dog saving the kitten from the pack of wolves; and fall in love with our flawless AI girlfriend(s).
For those with the eyes to see, the connections between the junk we eat and the AI slop we consume are stark. If we want to reform our technological habits and curb our AI slop consumption, we might want to start with reforming our diets first. Doing so, I believe, will greatly help us in our virtuous fight back towards the good life.
Remember, it is a pleasurable battle we are engaging in: we are recovering the enjoyment of good and wholesome food. But it will be a hard and painful fight at the same time. Our cravings, industrially-formed desires, and addictions will relentlessly rage against us and the food system will continue to tempt us every time we set foot in a supermarket. Keeping the goal of freedom, beauty, and health in front of our eyes is going to be imperative if we are to win. That is why I shall leave you with this beautiful and profound passage from Wendell Berry’s essay to help keep the goal in the forefront of our minds:
“The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden [or farm] in which their vegetables have grown and know the garden is healthy will remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of the morning when gardens are at their best. Such memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating.”2
What we put into our bodies matters. Our bodies are the most important thing we possess, thus we ought to take extreme care about what we allow into them — through our mouths, eyes, and ears. Our bodies are precious; far too precious for slop.3
If you would like to discuss Berry’s essay The Pleasures of Eating, I run a Wendell Berry reading group for my paid subscribers. More details here.
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According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
Wendell Berry, The Pleasures of Eating.
And before my good wife (whose diet is far better than mine) comes downstairs to me and says “hypocrite!” I am preaching this essay as much to myself as to you.
Absolutely brilliant essay. I really appreciate your naming the generators/posters of AI slop as “slop merchants.” It’s an incredibly dour term but extremely honest and eye-opening.
Interesting thoughts. I am of mixed thoughts & feelings re ai - depending on how it is used. I myself am required to use it in my work by my firm and they are pushing hard for its adoption. Thusfar I am not super impressed in my specific uses since it actually takes me more time to draft my system requirements & screen mockups using it - than if I didn’t. It’s more time consuming and challenging to use it to do the initial drafting and then having to edit & correct IT, then the otger way around. But I can’t help but think that the firm is using we humans to ‘train’ the ai models in the hope that they’ll eventually get good enough to do our jobs to a level of acceptable accuracy so they can then cut we humans - despite their protestations to the contrary saying we’re investing in tools to help you to increase ‘productivity’. Yeah - like - we actually believe that? Thankfully, I am closing in on retirement in 3-5 years anyway so just hoping I can ride the approaching storm out a little longer.
But - I have to say - I AM impressed with ai as a potentially highly effective search, research & summarization tool. Yes - you have to take the results and review them with a skeptical eye, but thusfar it’s pretty impressive. As a tool to assist in collecting and organizing information, and targeted use to help organize or edit ones notes & thoughts it seems quite useful. Though - it raises concerns of course about it taking ‘my’ thoughts and ideas - and using them elsewhere. Same concern as other writers and creatives arguing that their original work has been used and co-opted by ai without their consent. But once anything that is ‘out there’ - in the wilds of the public - anyone can ‘grab it’ and ‘use it’ with or without ai. 🤷♂️
But the big problem I see and as you point out - is the sheer volume of ‘junk’ or ‘slop’ being churned out making the ‘signal to noise’ ratio impossible to deal with. I’ve given up most social media for lent due to - 1. Politics 2. Temptation leading me to spend far too much time trying to find ‘signal’ (friend’s actual original posts - as opposed to reposts) OR getting sucked into ai slop & ads scrolling. But I’m seriously considering giving up on most SM for good beyond lent due to this ai slop problem.
Now, your thoughts re Wendell Berry’s essay and ‘junk food’ having laid the ground work for the current intellectual malaise of ai slop crap feeding our dopamine addicted non stop scrolling behavior - I think are true. But I would argue the bigger factor has been the simultaneous long term degradation of educational standards impacted by TV & video entertainment (‘Reality TV’ anyone) and video game junk entertainment, and low quality book & magazine ‘slop’ that has been rampant for decades. I used to love to take my time spending hours ‘surfing’ the library stacks reading and ‘hyper’ linking between titles on topics of interest to me. Now - teens and young adults and even full adults seem unable or unwilling to read anything more challenging than ‘spicy’ fantasy and simple fiction. They take their opinions from social media political ‘influencers’ and junk news. Trying to weed through all the crap even before ai was a challenge. Now - it’s getting damn near impossible. I think that’s exactly what ‘the powers that be’ want. They was us to be deaf, dumb & blind consumers addicted to their churned out ai slop & junk food. It’s Brave New World, Soylent Green, snd Wall-e being manifested in our world by the ‘powers & principalities’ that want us separated from the Creator who made us human - and from each other - to wallow alone in our mire & filth. (Sorry to take such a pessimistic tack there.). Question is - will we resist & how? PK argues against using ai or even smart phone tech as a whole - in entirety. I - am still in discernment on that. But that said I completely agree that I don’t want to waste my limited time reading ai churned ‘content’. I don’t mind an author using ai to research and help organize - but I want to engage with the author’s thoughts and words - not their prompted ai ‘assistant’s’ words.