The Slop Cycle—How Every Media Revolution Breeds Rubbish and Art
The popularization of the term “slop” for AI output follows a centuries-long pattern where new tools flood the zone, audiences adapt and some of tomorrow’s art emerges from today’s excess
Old metal printing letters used for traditional letterpress text printing.
Mass‑produced culture has a long, messy history. The biblical book of Ecclesiastes—thought to have been written between 300 and 200 B.C.E.—laments, “Of making many books there is no end.” This was in response to the flood of philosophical writings in the ancient Near East and Hellenistic world. Since then, whenever new tools to crank out communications have become available, somebody has flooded the zone with the fastest, most imitative material that could garner attention. But over the years, some of that sediment has incubated new artforms, and trash and treasure have appeared in the same stream.
One notable slop moment came after Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable-type printing press in Europe. The device—the ChatGPT of the 1450s—allowed the mass production of cheap printed material. Over the next 300 years, chapbooks and broadside ballads became mainstays in Britain. Carrying news, satire and story into places where expensive books had seldom reached, they were sold for pennies, tacked to alehouse walls and sung aloud for the illiterate. Some of this material was drivel, sure, but much of it entertained and educated the masses. It also inspired authors from William Shakespeare to Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
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In the early 1700s, a growing reading public and coffeehouse networks created steady demand for text, giving rise to Grub Street—the slop generator of its time. The name belonged to a London area with printing shops, booksellers and cheap lodgings where impoverished writers churned out pamphlets, satires, political tracts, sensational stories and hack journalism—whatever sold. Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary made “grubstreet” a synonym for “mean production.” Elites stirred up a now familiar moral panic about commerce corrupting letters and mocked Grub Street even as its writers built the first modern freelance economy and mass-print culture. Johnson himself made his early living in the Grub Street milieu, and other luminaries, such as Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood and Jonathan Swift, all wrote for the burgeoning market.
The 20th-century cinema boom followed a similar pattern. By 1908 roughly 8,000 nickelodeons—five‑cent storefront theaters—ran nonstop shows. The production demands produced a lot of rubbish, but this effort also developed the motion-picture industry’s infrastructure while spreading information and helping newly arrived immigrants learn English. Even in the 1960s and 1970s, B-movie studios churned out films while training directors and actors who would reshape Hollywood, such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro.
In all of these situations, the point wasn’t to forge masterpieces; it was to create rapidly and cheaply. But the production of new types of slop widens the on‑ramps, allowing more people to participate—just as the Internet and social media birthed bunk but also new kinds of creators. Perhaps because much of mass‑made culture has been forgettable, original work stands out even clearer against the backdrop of sameness, and audiences begin to demand more of it.
The current wave of AI‑generated slop raises the stakes because the cost for those making slop has collapsed to near zero, while the cost for others is high in terms of cognitive burden—of doubting what we see and experiencing the demands on our attention—not to mention the environmental cost of heavy computing. The onslaught of mass-produced content urgently requires that we identify and elevate what stands out so that we can better discourage what doesn’t. The word “slop” helps us do that when it is used correctly.
Willison and deepfates were careful to specify that not all AI content is slop. Many human-guided AI creations are original, surprising and affecting. Some have been displayed in museums. Calling everything worthless is a misguided attempt to dam the flood rather than channel it.
If “culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind,” as Welsh cultural theorist Raymond Williams wrote in 1958, then the ordinary act of making at scale will always include waste. But with work and luck, it’ll also produce the seeds of the next thing we’ll decide to keep.
Deni Ellis Béchard is Scientific American’s senior writer for technology. He is author of 10 books and has received a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, a Midwest Book Award and a Nautilus Book Award for investigative journalism. He holds two master’s degrees in literature, as well as a master’s degree in biology from Harvard University. His most recent novel, We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine, explores the ways that artificial intelligence could transform humanity. You can follow him on X, Instagram and Bluesky @denibechard
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