For years now, Facebook’s feeds have been drowned out by an unrelenting tidal wave of AI slop, turning the platform — which feels like it’s long been abandoned by practically anybody under the age of 65 — into an unrecognizable digital hellscape.
It’s already been two years since we came across a picture of “shrimp Jesus” for the first time, an early form of AI-generated junk that foreshadowed an even more nonsensical future, culminating in Merriam-Webster making “slop” its 2025 word of the year last month.
Now, thanks to the advent of accessible text-to-video generators, which can cough up footage from a simple text prompt, the situation on Facebookand other Meta platforms is turning from dire to disastrous.
A quick perusal of the r/FacebookAIslop subreddit reveals the macabre underbelly of the AI slop world, once again highlighting how social media feeds have turned from posts created by our friends and family into an endless parade of mind-numbing drek.
One 50-second video making its rounds shows what appears to be a humanoid cat cooking a meal, only for its kitten-shaped daughter to dive headfirst into a meat grinder and be turned to pulp. The kitten’s parents remain unaware, only to puke up green sludge after unintentionally eating their offspring. The baffling clip ends with the mother cat being arrested by the police, leaving her feline husband sobbing on the floor.
Another clip, originally posted on Meta’s Instagram, shows a “shark doctor” spraying a Black baby white with paint, while charring a white baby with a torch in what appears to be a maternity ward. The clip is chock-full of bafflingly racist stereotypes. Yet another clip shows a goosebumps-inducingly photorealistic cat with eight spider legs crawling down the side of a wall.
The sheer amount of junk polluting Facebook and Instagram feeds is unlikely to go away any time soon. As Facebook’s vice president of product, Jagjit Chawla, told CNET last year, the company’s algorithms respond to users watching specific pieces of content.
“If you, as a user, are interested in a piece of content which happens to be AI-generated, the recommendations algorithm will determine that, over time, you are interested in this topic and content,” he said. “If you are not into it, which, for lack of a better term, there is a set of users who would consider that content AI slop, and if you have given us signals that this is not for you, that algorithm will respond appropriately to make sure we don’t show you more of that.”
Reading between the lines, users who are watching in horror as their news feeds devolve into a lifeless wave of slop are the source of their own demise.
The company’s algorithms are also responding to positive signals, like liking, commenting, or sharing — and considering the slop being shared on Facebook is getting plenty of those, it’s no wonder we’re seeing more and more of it in our feeds.
The issue goes beyond humanoid sharks and cats. One clip spotted by Agence France-Presse shows the United States’ first lady Melania Trump spending $10 million to build a church and showing up “alone to decorate it for Christmas.” Another clip shows singer Sabrina Carpenter attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony of a new church.
Some is overt theft. Hollywood screenwriter Scott Collette recently noticed that an AI Facebook account was stealing his history posts and “slopping out new captions.”
In retaliation, he started “feeding it poison pills,” causing the page’s followers to have “meltdowns” in the comments.
Other companies have since acknowledged the issue of AI slop, pledging to address the issue. For instance, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said that combating slop will be a “top priority” this year.
Whether Meta will follow suit remains to be seen. For now, it will be up to users to decide whether they’re willing to trudge through a barrage of AI sludge to see glimpses of what their friends and family have been posting — that is, if they even bothered to in the first place.
More on Facebook AI slop: Man Realizes He Can Feed Poison Pills to Facebook AI Slop Page, Driving Its Followers Berserk