We're living in a new era some call the "Slopocene" defined by overproduced, low-quality AI content flooding the internet. This isn't just about poor posts cluttering our feeds; it represents a fundamental erosion of information reliability.
The problem is multifaceted: people's trust in science, journalism, and credible sources is crumbling while tech platforms prioritise profits over truth. Meanwhile, AI-generated "slop" low-effort, high-volume content; dominates online spaces, creating what the Conversation article (see link above) describes as a potential future where "recursive training collapse turns the web into a haunted archive of confused bots and broken truths."
As AI systems increasingly train on AI-generated content, we risk a feedback loop of degrading information quality, like making photocopies of photocopies until meaning is lost.
This isn't the digital future anyone wanted. We're caught between technological dependence and growing awareness of these systems' limitations and misuse. While there are no simple solutions, being more intentional about information consumption, more critical of sources, and more supportive of genuine journalism and research becomes crucial.
In this age of AI slop, authentic human insight has never been more valuable or more at risk.
I’m using this post to hold an interesting experiment. There are actually two blog posts one here and the other on Meet the People. They both express the same ideas, but one is an original written by Norm and the other is a reinterpretation by an AI. Could I ask you to read both? Then leave a comment on the article you believe is generated by the AI (Claude Sonnet 4) and the post written directly by me.
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