Clickbait evolved into AI slop — here's why it's more dangerous

As AI tools make it less necessary to browse the web thanks to AI-generated overviews and instant answers, another side of the technology is pushing users away from online content: AI slop.

AI slop is low-quality AI-generated content often produced at scale and distributed widely with questionable intent. Whether the goal is to perpetuate stereotypes, manufacture outrage, or simply farm views for ad revenue, the result is the same: feeds flooded with content that serves only its creator’s interests.

I’d consider that sending your group chat an AI-edited selfie for laughs classifies as harmless fun, but countless channels are springing up on social media, churning out soulless content at an industrial scale.

A lot of it is being documented by “Insane AI Slop” an account on X run by a Paris-based student. He’s catalogued everything from images of bears blocking the entrance to Yellowstone, to babies wrapped in spaghetti, and people celebrating their 1,800th birthday. All of it is AI-generated, of course.

We’ve been here before

Text-to-video tools started to become publicly available in 2023, but low-effort content flooding the internet is nothing new. We’ve survived spam infiltrating our inboxes with “Forward this to 10 friends…” style chain emails, Nigerian prince scams, and content farms obsessed with gaming Google’s ranking systems. Don’t even get me started on clickbait.

“Clickbait was often obviously trying to sell you something. AI slop can look like a normal post, but at the same time the content is actually quite hollow and repetitive,” Deidre Popovich, an associate professor of marketing at Texas Tech University, told Tom’s Guide.

“That’s part of why it feels especially annoying, because it wastes our attention while pretending to be helpful,” Popovich said.

Hryhorii Hoherchak, a software engineer at Google Poland, describes AI slop as “clickbait with a brain.”

“It can adjust to changing trends, learn what you like and is much harder to defeat. And is often a shiny video rather than a catchy piece of text,” Hoherchak told Tom’s Guide.

Why AI slop goes viral

If AI slop is, at best, mildly entertaining to mock, why does it keep going viral?

Popovich compares producing AI slop to playing the lottery. “Creators can run endless variations until something ‘hits’, because the marginal cost of content production is essentially zero,” she told me. “High volume posting will end up resulting in some ‘winners’, even when most posts end up being junk.”

Popovich added that people are especially prone to engaging with content if it’s easy to process and emotionally engaging, even if they don’t necessarily enjoy it. “AI content often leverages our psychological shortcuts to gain our attention,” she said.

Which got me thinking. If social media platforms could serve us more AI slop if they spot us engaging with it, does it mean big tech is already able to accurately identify it? If so, could companies technically apply a filter that rids us of this plague tomorrow?

Angie Waller, an intelligence specialist at Graphika — a company that analyzes social media landscapes — told me that if this kind of targeting is happening, it’s almost certainly not intentional. Detecting AI-generated imagery reliably at scale remains an evolving challenge.

“It’s more probable that other signals are at work: the content may share messaging patterns with similar accounts, or users who engaged with one piece of low-quality content have behavioral profiles that resemble others who did the same,” Waller told Tom’s Guide.

“In many cases, users are simply seeing more content from the same account — channels that specialize in this material are common, and once the algorithm connects a user to one, it tends to surface more from the same source,” she said.

Final thoughts

Through Instagram and Facebook reels Meta could generate more than $50 billion this year alone, so I suspect social media companies will take a more heavy-handed approach to AI slop if it significantly starts to challenge this kind of revenue.

However, just a few days ago, I received a Facebook notification encouraging me to use Manus, an AI tool that also offers video generation, to “create engaging content”. Meta acquired Manus in December 2025.

Not exactly the signs of a crackdown on AI content.

Incidentally, when I asked ChatGPT to predict how 2026 will shape out to be, it said anonymous content will lose influence online as people turn to known authors, verified sources, and institutional credibility amid a flood of AI-generated content.

Seems like now is the perfect time to be more intentional about who you follow, engage with, and support online. Or if you’re thinking about becoming a creator yourself, start thinking about what will make your content more meaningful.

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