In the algorithm-driven economy of 2025, one man’s shrimp Jesus is another man’s side hustle.
AI slop – the low-quality, surreal content flooding social media platforms, designed to farm views – is a phenomenon, some would say the phenomenon of the 2024 and 2025 internet. Merriam-Webster’s word of the year this year is “slop”, referring exclusively to the internet variety.
It came about shortly after the advent of popular large language models, such as ChatGPT and Dall-E, which democratised content creation and enabled vast swathes of internet denizens to create images and videos that resembled – to varying degrees – the creations of professionals.
In 2024, it began to achieve peak cultural moments. Notable among these was shrimp Jesus, a viral trend in which Facebook was briefly flooded with AI-generated images of the deity fused with crustaceans. Shrimp Jesus was quickly followed by hallmarks of the AI slop genre: videos of old women claiming to celebrate their 122nd birthday, and mini soap operas about the dramatic lives of cats.
In 2025, the flood continued, growing more uncanny and more explicitly copyright-violating. This spring saw the advent of Ghiblification – that is, a trend in which users from Nayib Bukele to the White House rendered images, including of deportations, in the style of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli. This particular moment was enabled by OpenAI’s release of an image generator powered by GPT-4o; Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, jumped on the trend by Ghiblifying his X profile and writing the rather remarkable post:
>be me
>grind for a decade trying to help make superintelligence to cure cancer or whatever
>mostly no one cares for first 7.5 years, then for 2.5 years everyone hates you for everything
>wake up one day to hundreds of messages: “look i made you into a twink ghibli style haha”— Sam Altman (@sama) March 26, 2025
Miyazaki, the chief architect of Studio Ghibli’s distinctive, hand-drawn animation style, has elsewhere said, on the subject of artificial intelligence: “I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel this is an insult to life itself.”
Other AI slop moments followed: a spate of videos of AI-generated obese people participating in the Olympics, pressure cookers exploding, more cats. Ibrahim Traoré, the leader of the military junta in Burkina Faso, became the centrepiece of an AI slop cult featuring videos of Justin Bieber singing on the streets of Ouagadougou.
In some ways, AI slop has improved. Gone – mostly – are the days of six-fingered hands and missing limbs that characterised the output of early image generators. In some ways, though, AI slop has hardly changed at all. It is still uncanny and contextless, still aimed directly at the amygdala, still chasing virality by virtue of having the lowest barriers to entry imaginable: no plot, no exposition, surreal imagery and cats, cats, cats.
Describing this flood of unreality as…
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