In the algorithm-driven landscape of 2025, a bizarre new digital economy has flourished, built on a flood of surreal and often nonsensical content known as 'AI slop'. This phenomenon, which has come to define the internet of 2024 and 2025, ranges from images of 'Shrimp Jesus' to videos of erotic tractors, all designed to farm views and engagement.
The Rise of Algorithmic Unreality
The term 'slop' was named Merriam-Webster's word of the year, specifically referring to this low-quality, AI-generated content. It emerged swiftly after the popularisation of large language models like ChatGPT and image generators like Dall-E, which democratised creation tools and enabled millions to produce content that vaguely mimics professional work.
In 2024, the trend hit peak cultural moments. The most notable was 'Shrimp Jesus', a viral wave where Facebook feeds were briefly saturated with AI images of Christ fused with crustaceans. This was quickly followed by other hallmarks of the genre: videos claiming to show 122-year-old women and dramatic mini-soap operas about the lives of cats.
The deluge continued into 2025, growing more uncanny and brazen in its disregard for copyright. This spring saw the advent of 'Ghiblification', where users—from El Salvador's president Nayib Bukele to the White House—rendered images, including scenes of deportations, in the distinctive style of Hayao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli. This was powered by OpenAI's GPT-4o image generator.
OpenAI's chief executive, Sam Altman, even participated, Ghiblifying his X profile. Miyazaki, however, has been a vocal critic, stating that using AI in art "is an insult to life itself".
A Global Side Hustle
Describing AI slop as merely a technological craise misses a crucial economic driver. It is the endpoint of an internet optimised purely for engagement, turbocharged by powerful new tools. It is also a product of a global economy increasingly reliant on a few tech giants, where real work offers dwindling returns but viral success can bring lavish fortunes.
Being an AI slop creator is now a profession, with practitioners from the United States to India, Kenya, and Ukraine. Arsenii Alenichev, a researcher studying image production, notes AI tools have enabled a 'strange globalisation' of content. He identified a flood of 'AI poverty porn' on stock photo sites, often created by users with eastern European usernames.
Success, however, is elusive. Oleksandr, a creator from Chernivtsi, Ukraine, estimates only the top 5% of creators monetise their videos, and just 1% make a living. He started in 2024 after retiring from professional volleyball, deep in debt and with his parents in occupied Mariupol.
His initial venture involved AI-generated music over images of 'sexy AI girls'. He quickly learned that effort didn't correlate with success on YouTube. "It was a conveyor belt, with fairly low quality," he said. At his peak, he ran a team of 15 managing 930 channels, clearing up to $20,000 (£15,000) a month.
The Clickbait Formula
Oleksandr's content evolved. He found lucrative niches in AI-generated life stories for grandparents and, more riskily, in 'vulgar adult themes' like erotic tractors. These videos, while often blocked, faced less competition and were sometimes easier to monetise.
"To make money here, you need to spend as little as possible," he explained. "YouTube is basically just clickbait and sexualisation, no matter how morally sad it is. Such is the world and the consumer." Today, increased platform crackdowns have reduced his team's income to around $3,000 monthly, but the work resolved his debts and built a career.
A YouTube spokesperson stated: "Generative AI is a tool, and like any tool it can be used to make both high- and low-quality content. We remain focused on connecting our users with high-quality content... All content uploaded to YouTube must comply with our community guidelines."
The flood of AI slop underscores a fundamental shift: the internet is now dominated by contextless, amygdala-targeting content, where the lowest barriers to entry—surreal imagery, cats, and sheer absurdity—are the surest path to virality in an economy that rewards the lucky few.
