Synopsis
The internet’s new junk food is here. Tanya Pandey & Himanshi Lohchab find out why AI slop is flooding your feed and shrinking your attention.Listen to this article in summarized format
These episodes triggered debate over so-called ‘AI slop’—low-cost videos made with generative AI designed to maximise clicks and watch time. But they also revealed something more significant: audiences are increasingly consuming AI content, often without realising it.
Open Instagram for five minutes and you may suddenly find yourself watching a hyper-realistic tomato arguing with a cucumber about relationships, AI-generated babies cooking food, or an oddly satisfying clip of an AI-generated cute dog playing in a garden. You scroll, maybe laugh, maybe share it, maybe even watch till the end. Then another one appears, and another, and without even realising it, you are caught in a loop.
Across Instagram, YouTube and short video platforms, AI slop has quietly become one of the internet’s fastest growing content categories, flooding feeds at a massive scale. They range from bizarre autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) clips to motivational videos stitched together by synthetic voices and generated visuals. The content often looks disposable. Yet they clock millions of views.
Industry experts say the phenomenon is exposing a deeper reality about how social media algorithms work.
The Attention Economy
“The algorithm is largely indifferent to whether content is AI-generated or human made. It reads behaviour, not origin,” said Neel Gogia, founder of IPLIX Media, an influencer marketing company. Gogia’s team tested an AI generated trend video on Instagram which crossed more than three million views. “No preferential treatment, no suppression. The algorithm did not know or care,” he said.
A YouTube spokesperson said the platform remains focused on connecting users with “high quality content” and is actively building on systems used to combat spam, clickbait and repetitive AI-generated uploads. That indifference is precisely why AI slop works.
Anirudh Sridharan, cofounder of creator marketing platform HashFame, called it a pure arbitrage game built on near-zero production costs and endless output. “Platforms optimise for watch time, completion rate, looping behaviour and shares. AI slop is engineered for exactly this,” he said.
The internet has seen versions of this before. Clickbait headlines. Meme pages. Search Engine Optimisation farms. But AI has dramatically lowered the cost and speed of manufacturing attention. For platforms, though, the relationship with AI slop is becoming complicated. Umang Bedi, cofounder of VerSe Innovation, parent company of short video app Josh, said most AI use on Josh today remains assistive rather than fully generative. “Creators are using AI tools for dubbing, editing, localisation and scaling content across languages,” he said.
Fatigue Setting in
Bedi also acknowledged that user fatigue is becoming real. “Fatigue shows up through declining completion rates, higher skip behaviour and lower repeat engagement, and distribution adjusts accordingly,” he said. That tension is beginning to define the AI content economy. Platforms are rewarding content that gets attention while trying to stop feeds from getting flooded with repetitive AI spam. Sridharan said some platforms are updating algorithms to detect and downrank “engagement farming” and synthetic spam. The economics of AI slop are equally fragile. “The honest answer is that most of them are not making meaningful money,” Gogia said. According to him, most AI content accounts depend on platform monetisation and ad revenue rather than serious brand partnerships. Vinay Pillai, chief business officer at Clout, influencer management business of Pocket Aces, drew parallels with meme pages. “People enjoy content if it resonates with them and move on. There is no relationship being built, no loyalty, no ‘I need to tell my friend about this person’,” he said. That lack of emotional connection is emerging as the biggest constraint for AI generated content. One prominent Indian creator, who requested anonymity, compared AI slop to junk food.
Archisman Misra, founder and CEO, StudioBackdrops, an ecommerce platform for photo backdrops, believes audiences are beginning to recognise the pattern. Misra argued that the internet is moving toward a future where content volume matters less than human perspective. And perhaps that is the real anxiety underneath the AI slop explosion.
Nobody wants a future where every feed feels synthetic and emotionally weightless. Nobody wants characters like Penny from The Big Bang Theory or Jim from The Office or Phil from The Modern Family to become endlessly generated AI clips made only to keep people scrolling. Some stories feel sacred because they came from real human emotions, timing, and lived experiences.
AI can manufacture infinite content. What it cannot manufacture consistently is meaning.
At least not yet.
