Who’s writing this article? A person? A robot? A machine trained to predict what the next best word might be? So much of the internet is now not as it seems – in fact, some estimates suggest that nearly one-third of all internet traffic comes from bots. This means you’re right to question who’s tapping away behind the screen, or who’s holding the camera. Much of the online world as we now know it is fake.
Filling up feeds and generating yet another layer of internet noise is a new category of digital content, designed to hold attention, generate engagement, and take up space as we scroll. AI slop, crowned the 2025 “word of the year” by Merriam-Webster, can now be spotted everywhere, spamming TikTok scrolls, X accounts, and YouTube video after video. Not quite the entertaining or educational experience we’d like the internet to be for our kids.
It might seem harmless, if not just a bit annoying – but there are several ways AI slop spells trouble. Let’s take a look at how low-quality AI content affects kids’ scrolls, their attention, and how they see the world.
What is AI slop?
According to the dictionary definition, AI slop is low-quality digital content, mostly created in large quantities with the “help” of artificial intelligence. This type of content feels just like it sounds – “slop”. Unpleasant, wasteful, and exactly what you wouldn’t want to see circulating in your feed.
It can be hard to put your finger on exactly what that looks like, especially as AI slop can just be plain weird – you’d never imagine the scenarios or images it spits out in your wildest dreams. Soap operas featuring cats in high heels, woodland animals playing ding dong ditch at night, and interviews with 1-year-olds experiencing their first vacation.
Kids can easily come across videos like this in their feeds, and sometimes their obvious silliness or wackiness is what makes them more shareable. Take the Italian brainrot trend that swept YouTube Shorts and playgrounds around the world, where sharks wearing sneakers and a cup of coffee styled as a ballerina got so popular they earned their own merchandise, from trading cards to plush toys.
So it’s just weird videos then?
AI slop goes further than ridiculous animal videos. Any low-quality content that AI creates, including text, images, audio, and video, can be bundled in as AI slop. Some slop fills feeds, while some masquerades as “useful”, such as AI-generated articles created with no interest in accuracy – just content for content’s sake.
AI slop is created to get your attention, one way or another. For text, it might be created to generate money through ads that run on the same site (more clicks, more cash). On social media, the more engagement videos, text, and images get, the more successful the content and the account posting it can be.
In some cases, there might be darker motives behind AI slop. People or organizations can use tools to create deepfakes of real people, political messaging with a certain agenda, or images or videos designed to trick people and scam them.
How is AI slop influencing the internet?
If you scrolled social media even for a minute in 2025, you’ve probably already seen how AI slop is affecting the internet. No matter your interest, the volume of AI content being produced means it’s probably made it onto your feed in some way or another. Music and playlists on Spotify, crafting tutorials on Reels, and even AI-generated overviews in Google can fall prey to the “slopification” of the internet. It overwhelms social media, search results, and even book browsing on places like Amazon.
It’s changing the way we explore the internet, and how we interact with it – marketers choose AI to generate ads, messages get pushed through AI-produced deepfakes, and AI-informed, misinformed articles get published, which AI then uses as “truth” to generate even more articles. Instead of rejecting this fake, misleading content, companies are actively embracing it: with entirely AI-generated feeds like those on Sora 2 and Meta’s Vibes, it’s only poised to get worse.
Is AI slop harmful?
Not all AI slop is harmful. Videos of a dog hosting a podcast from its owners’ kitchen table is just that – a fake animal video designed to make people watch, double-tap, or even share. But there are some problems with AI slop content, especially for kids. Here’s what to watch for:
Brain rot content
This type of content – short, repetitive, low-effort, and often bizarre – is harmless, but also mindless. It takes up kids’ time, spams their feeds, and can feel random (making it more fun in their eyes). Brain rot content often features loud noises, bright visuals, or other overstimulating factors that draw kids in and keep them watching short clips. The more they engage, the more likely they are to see more of this content in their feed, over time making it more difficult to find educational, entertaining, or valuable content on places like YouTube.
Misinformation and scams
While fake news and scams are nothing new on the internet, AI helps produce them faster, and increases the quantity of misinformation or deliberately misleading content out there. This means it’s harder to stop the spread, whether through fake stories designed to harm or slander someone or push a narrative, or AI-produced information that the AI tool itself hallucinates. For example, a website could publish an AI-generated fake news story, which then later gets cited by other publications or AI tools, treating it as real. This makes it harder to verify what we’re reading, watching, and engaging with online.
Loss of creativity
When used carefully, AI can be a tool that pushes us to explore more, or helps speed up our creative process. AI slop, however, does neither of these things, and overshadows real human creativity in social media feeds. AI photos and videos can drive attention away from real creators, making them less visible as they compete more with bots in a sea of auto-generated content.
Eroding trust
As more and more fake content springs up, it comes to a point where we have to question everything that we see or read online. While it’s healthy to be critical, this way of thinking wears down trust in people and organizations which previously might have been well-regarded, or a source of truth. If children don’t know what’s real and what’s fake, they also won’t know what or who they can trust online, making it difficult for them to know who to turn to for advice or where to verify information.
How to spot AI slop
AI slop comes in many different forms. It could be text, video, audio, or image content, which means the signs can vary depending on the type of content your kids are consuming. That means it’s important to get your kids thinking about ways that content can be shaped or manipulated in different ways. Here are some ways they can check, from more obvious clues to ways they can shape their thought process:
1. Check for watermarks
When people make videos with Sora, Open AI’s video generator, there’ll usually be a watermark indicating it’s been made with the tool. That said, there are also tools available that remove these watermarks, or other platforms that don’t insert one at all. If a watermark has been removed, there might be a pixelated area on the screen, or a section that looks as if it’s been passed over with an eraser.
2. Understanding AI “tells” in written content
Unfortunately for fans of the em dash (—), ChatGPT’s frequent overuse of it means it’s been called out as a frequent AI “tell” – perhaps unfairly, as writers, journalists, and editors have been using it without issue for many, many years. Instead of pointing to em dashes or individual phrasing alone, it’s useful to think more about the text overall:
- Is it consistent? Repeated phrases or patterns could be an indication of AI – humans are more likely to switch up structures and flow, rather than relying on a formula or memorized format.
- Does it make sense? Sometimes, AI will produce sentences and paragraphs that don’t really have a clear answer, or display coherent information.
- What’s the final message? AI answers often skirt issues and stay surface-level – it’s only through deeper prompting that the user can explore further, which AI slop articles will often avoid doing.
- Where are the sources? AI can give citations, but it often gives incorrect ones, doesn’t format them correctly, or doesn’t link them at all.
3. Look for unnatural behavior
AI can mimic interaction (and is getting better at it), but it’s not always good at representing the subtle ways that people and animals move, or what we might expect in the background of a photo/video. Watch for jerky movements, things that appear or suddenly disappear, or actions that don’t make logical sense (for example, a bike riding through a car in background “traffic”).
AI can make the subject of the video look unnaturally flawless – think smooth skin, no texture, no frizzy hair – while not being able to generate the same in the background. Crowds could have distorted faces, the same group of buildings could be repeated, or one person could be cloned several times in the background.
4. Pay attention to the audio
Sometimes, the audio and video in AI-generated content don’t match up – the person’s lips might be moving, but the audio comes through more slowly, or doesn’t match what they’re saying. AI audio can also sometimes sound garbled, pronunciation could be completely incorrect, or the background noise of a video doesn’t match what’s actually appearing on the screen.
5. Think about the content
A much simpler way to hone in on AI slop is by encouraging your child to ask themselves if what they’re viewing or consuming is actually possible or plausible. Checking accounts, sources, and where the video comes from is also a key step – if a profile is full of more AI-generated content, it’s likely not to be real, and if an account was recently created, that can be a red flag.
While some AI slop is more obvious than others, AI is a constantly evolving technology. What makes an AI “tell” one month might soon be fixed or ironed out as the technology develops, so it’s important to teach kids how to think critically about what they consume, ask openly about the things they enjoy and who they engage with online, and let them know who they can turn to if they’re unsure about anything they see as they browse.
By staying involved in your child’s online experiences, talking to them about what they’re seeing and engaging with, and setting them up with the right skills, you can help them tune out the noise – and above all, navigate the digital world with confidence.
