Flood of unreality is an endpoint of algorithm-driven internet and product of an economy dependent on a few top tech firms
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.
It came about shortly after the advent of popular large language models, such as ChatGPT and Dall-E, which democratised content creation and enabled vast swathes of internet denizens to create images and videos that resembled – to varying degrees – the creations of professionals.
In 2024, it began to achieve peak cultural moments. Notable among these was shrimp Jesus, a viral trend in which Facebook was briefly flooded with AI-generated images of the deity fused with crustaceans. Shrimp Jesus was quickly followed by hallmarks of the AI slop genre: videos of old women claiming to celebrate their 122nd birthday, and mini soap operas about the dramatic lives of cats.
