Human Slop Losing Ground to AI Slop

Displaced Worker Now Trains Replacement Software

SAN FRANCISCO — New research has confirmed that AI-generated slop has achieved statistical indistinguishability from human-generated slop, threatening the livelihoods of thousands of workers who spent years perfecting the art of writing articles nobody asked for.

The findings, drawn from a Graphite analysis of 65,000 English-language articles, showed AI-generated content now constitutes roughly 52% of new web content, a figure that researchers said reflects a kind of mutual degradation rather than any technological triumph.

"We've reached a point where you genuinely cannot tell if '17 Celebrities Who Aged Badly' was written by a human or a machine," said Dr. Helena Voss, a media studies professor at the University of Amsterdam. "This should concern us, though perhaps not for the reasons we originally anticipated."

The development arrived days after Merriam-Webster crowned "slop" as its 2025 word of the year, defining it as "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity." The dictionary noted the term's etymology traced to the 1700s meaning of "soft mud" before evolving in the 1800s to mean "food waste" and eventually "a product of little or no value."

For workers at content farms worldwide, the implications were immediate and devastating. Rajesh Chandrasekaran, who spent six years at a Bangalore-based content agency specializing in SEO-optimized listicles, said he was blindsided by the speed of displacement.

"I gave everything to this work," Chandrasekaran said. "Years of craft, gone in 18 months."

Industry groups estimated that content farm employment has contracted 34% since late 2023, with remaining workers increasingly relegated to "quality assurance" roles, including editing AI-generated drafts rather than producing original mediocre content themselves.

"The human touch is still valued," said Margaret Liu, chief content officer at ViralMill Media. "Someone needs to add the grammatical errors that make it feel authentic."

Google declined to comment on whether its algorithm could distinguish between human and AI slop. A spokesperson said only that the company remained "committed to surfacing high-quality content," a category that excludes both. ■