How Much of the Internet Is AI Slop? - by Daniel Parris

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How Much of the Internet Is AI Slop?<br>The rise of AI slop, measured.

Daniel Parris<br>May 20, 2026

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AI slop cats.<br>Quick housekeeping note: I’ve added a lot of new dashboards and datasets for paying subscribers over the past few months—covering movies, music, TV, podcasts, and more—so I’ve launched a new directory to help browse the full collection. Check out the new Dashboards & Datasets directory here.

Intro: 19th-Century Brain Rot

For the chronically online, the term “brain rot” is an affliction that defines our present moment: the product of a media ecosystem built on low-effort, hyper-stimulating content. Given the concept’s ever-growing relevance, I assumed its origin was also fairly recent—coined offhandedly by some BuzzFeed writer. But upon further research, I was surprised to learn that humanity’s struggle with “brain rot” dates back to the 19th century.<br>Published in 1854, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden includes a passage in which the author laments a society-wide softening of the mind. Ever the snob, Thoreau compares the public’s appetite for trivial ideas to an English potato blight: “While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot,” he asks, “will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”<br>One hundred and seventy years later, Oxford named brain rot its 2024 Word of the Year, narrowly beating out demure and romantasy. Well done, Henry David Thoreau. The term’s usage exploded in 2023, as large language models went mainstream and AI-generated content flooded the internet, with the worst of this garbage commonly dismissed as “AI slop.” The brain rot of 1854 concerned cheap literature and carnivalesque entertainment; the brain rot of 2026 is something newer, faster, and unnervingly synthetic. And as AI slop spreads across beloved social media platforms, so too does this metaphorical rot.<br>So today, we’ll investigate the prevalence of AI slop in modern media and the economic incentives that may help tame its spread.<br>How Much of the Internet Is AI Slop?

OpenAI launched ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. Prior to this milestone, the world’s understanding of machine intelligence was limited to AOL Instant Messenger bots, Microsoft’s Clippy, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. OpenAI’s major breakthrough was not simply building a powerful large language model, but making the technology accessible through a conversational interface. This overly agreeable bot could answer follow-up questions, admit mistakes, challenge faulty assumptions, and write a limerick about my dad’s favorite baseball player in the style of Dr. Seuss.<br>ChatGPT adeptly mimicked literature and speech, enabling its users to outsource one of humanity’s most annoying obligations: creating meaning by sequencing words into sentences, and then arranging those sentences into paragraphs.<br>Four years later, it appears human expression (or, rather, synthetic human expression) should require some additional friction.<br>According to a longitudinal study from the growth marketing agency Graphite, nearly half of newly published digital content appears to be AI-generated.

Source: Graphite.<br>This chart comes with two caveats:<br>Graphite advertises itself as an AI-powered SEO agency, so its bleak portrait of content decay also supports its core business. Gross!

This graph would probably look different if weighted by web traffic—because human-created work still accounts for an outsized share of what people actually read.

Even if this chart is off by a factor of two, the underlying trend remains alarming.<br>This chart belongs to a canonical genre of data visualization, which I like to call “ChatGPT launched, and then a line goes up and to the right.”<br>Take literature, for example, where monthly Amazon e-book releases nearly tripled following ChatGPT’s introduction, a trend that roughly corroborates the Graphite study.

The reach of AI-produced text extends well beyond amateur authors peddling slop or SEO bloggers gaming search algorithms. Academia, a field tasked with expanding the boundaries of human knowledge, has also embraced machine intelligence. One Nature analysis measured the growing ratio of rejected to accepted scientific papers, offering another example of an LLM-induced supply shock: as writing becomes easier, submissions rise, and rejection rates follow. Here again, we see the same basic pattern—a near-tripling of productivity.

Source: Nature.<br>While the sheer volume of AI-generated text is concerning, it’s hard to tell how many of these synthetic articles, e-books, or papers are actually being consumed.<br>The same cannot be said of algorithmic social media feeds, where transitory engagement can snowball into widespread virality. According to a comprehensive study from video production firms Kapwing and NeoMam Studios, around 33% of all YouTube short-form videos qualify as brain rot (nonsensical, low-quality, but not...