Why 90% of AI Content Is Garbage — The AI Slop Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

AI slop is the flood of low-quality, mindlessly generated AI content that’s drowning the internet — nobody asked for it, nobody benefits from it, and it’s making everything worse. The ai slop problem isn’t that AI exists. It’s that lazy people found a way to use AI as a replacement for thinking.

Let me be clear about who I am before I start swinging: we use AI here at AODN. Every day. Unapologetically. But there’s a canyon-sized difference between using AI as a tool and using it as a replacement for having anything to say. One produces value. The other produces slop. And right now, the internet is absolutely drowning in the latter.

What Is AI Slop and Why Should You Care?

The term “ai slop” was coined and popularized by developer Simon Willison, and it spread fast because it named something everyone was already experiencing but couldn’t articulate. Willison put it perfectly:

“Not all AI-generated content is slop. But if it’s mindlessly generated and thrust upon someone who didn’t ask for it, slop is the perfect term.”
— Simon Willison, Developer and creator of the term “AI slop”

The word hit so hard that Merriam-Webster named “slop” its 2025 Word of the Year. Greg Barlow, President of Merriam-Webster, called it “almost a defiant word when it comes to AI” — people want things that are real, things that are genuine. The dictionary literally validated your frustration.

AI slop isn’t just bad writing. It’s content with no perspective, no expertise, no original thought — just statistical averages of everything that’s ever been written, regurgitated into something that technically resembles an article. It’s the difference between a meal someone cooked for you and a protein slurry that technically contains all the right nutrients.

This matters to you specifically if you run a WordPress site or create content for a living. Because your competitors are pumping this stuff out by the terabyte, Google is actively trying to bury it, and the audience you’re trying to reach is getting better every day at sniffing it out. Understanding what AI Or Die Now fights against starts here — the quantity-over-quality machine that’s making the web worse for everyone.

The Numbers Don’t Lie — AI Content Is Drowning the Internet

Here’s where the rant gets backed up by cold, ugly data. According to Ahrefs, 74.2% of newly created web pages contain some AI-generated content. That’s not a fringe thing. That’s the default state of the modern web.

eWeek reported that 57% of all online text has been AI-generated or AI-translated. Gartner predicted back in 2023 that 90% of online content could be AI-generated by 2026 — and looking at that 74.2% figure, they weren’t wrong to be worried. The video side is just as bad: 21-33% of YouTube feeds consist of ai slop or brainrot content. Kapwing tracked 278 AI slop YouTube channels that collectively amassed 63 billion views and $117 million in annual ad revenue. That’s not a hobby. That’s an industry built on garbage.

And it’s not staying on sketchy corners of the internet. The New York Times reported in March 2026 that 40% of videos recommended to children on YouTube appear to be ai slop. We’re feeding this stuff to kids now.

The Reuters Institute at Oxford University found that only 12% of people are comfortable with fully AI-generated news, compared to 62% for human-made content. The audience knows. They might not be able to articulate it, but they feel it — that hollow, nobody-home quality that ai slop carries like a fingerprint.

Why Most AI Content Is Absolute Garbage

The “just press generate” mentality is the root of the entire ai slop problem. Someone discovers they can produce 50 articles a day instead of 2. Their eyes light up. They stop thinking about whether any of those articles are worth reading and start thinking about how to produce 500.

The output of that mentality is content with no expertise, no lived experience, no actual opinion. AI doesn’t know anything — it predicts the most statistically likely next word based on everything it was trained on. That’s not knowledge. That’s averaging. And average is the enemy of useful.

Professor James Zou at the University of Florida put it bluntly: “When the AI content is middling, it harms both consumers and professionals by making it harder to find content worth consuming.” That’s the real cost of ai slop — it’s not just bad content, it’s noise that drowns out the signal. It makes the entire information ecosystem worse for everyone trying to find something real.

Then there are the hallucinations. AI confidently invents citations, misattributes quotes, fabricates statistics, and presents all of it in the same authoritative tone it uses for facts. When someone publishes that without checking it, they’ve just added a new layer of misinformation to the web. And because ai slop spreads fast and gets indexed fast, those errors propagate before anyone catches them.

The U.S. Copyright Office’s report on generative AI raises another angle: the legal and ethical questions around what AI was trained on, and what that means for the “original” content it produces. The quality problem and the ethics problem are the same problem, just viewed from different angles.

52% of consumers disengage the moment they identify content as AI-generated. More than half your audience will bounce if they smell ai slop — and they’re getting better at smelling it every month.

Google Knows It’s Garbage Too

Google has been dancing around this problem for years, but February 2026 is when they stopped dancing. The February 2026 core update specifically targeted what Google calls “scaled content abuse” — which is the polite corporate term for ai slop farms. Sites that had been pumping out mass AI content without meaningful human oversight saw traffic drops of 40-80%. Overnight. Gone.

Here’s what Google actually penalizes: laziness. They penalize content with no original value, no expertise signal, no reason to exist beyond capturing a keyword. They don’t penalize AI as a tool — they penalize the absence of human judgment and effort. That’s an important distinction that the “AI is going to kill SEO” crowd keeps getting wrong.

The evidence backs this up: 86% of top-ranking Google pages are still human-authored. The pages that rank are still, overwhelmingly, written by people who know their subject. AI hasn’t taken over the top of the SERPs — it’s flooded the bottom of the web with content that will never rank for anything.

SEO expert Lily Ray has been watching this play out in real time: “We’ve seen repeatedly that overreliance on purely AI-generated content, especially when it’s scaled quickly without meaningful originality, can be problematic.” That’s the diplomatic version. The undiplomatic version is: if you’re publishing ai slop, Google is coming for you.

The Nadella Problem — Big Tech Wants You to Stop Complaining

In January 2026, Satya Nadella — CEO of Microsoft, the company that bet its entire future on OpenAI — published a blog post essentially telling everyone to stop using the word “slop.” He wrote that “we need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication” and find some new equilibrium.

The internet’s response was immediate and perfect: they started calling Microsoft “Microslop.”

This is the most revealing moment in the entire ai slop debate. When the CEO of one of the most powerful companies on earth takes time out of his schedule to tell regular people that their word for a problem is wrong, you know two things. First, the word is landing. Second, the problem is real enough that it’s threatening the business model.

Silicon Valley has a vested interest in you not calling it slop. Every time someone uses that word, it chips away at the narrative that AI is purely additive, purely beneficial, making everything better. The ai slop problem is a PR problem for the entire AI industry, which is exactly why they’d like you to adopt some softer, more neutral language that doesn’t capture the visceral disgust people actually feel.

Don’t. “Slop” is the right word. It’s accurate, it’s visceral, and it communicates something that “low-quality AI-generated content” takes twelve words to say badly. The fact that Merriam-Webster made it their Word of the Year isn’t an accident — it’s the dictionary confirming that this word does real work.

What This Means for Your WordPress Site

Let’s get specific, because this is where most articles about ai slop go vague and useless. If you’re running a WordPress site and you’ve been publishing AI-generated articles without serious editing, without adding your own expertise, without original data or real opinions — you are part of the ai slop problem. That’s not an accusation, it’s a diagnosis. And diagnoses are useful.

Here’s the good news, and I mean this: quality content now stands out more than it ever has. When 74% of new pages are AI-generated, a page written by a human who actually knows their subject is a signal flare. The noise floor is so high that genuine expertise cuts through it.

That’s why content like our guide to actually speeding up your WordPress site or the deep dive on WordPress hooks and how they actually work performs — because that kind of depth, that kind of specificity, is something AI can’t replicate without a human who’s been inside WordPress long enough to know where the bodies are buried.

The difference between AI as a tool and AI as a replacement is everything. Using AI to draft, to research, to find gaps in your outline — that’s a tool. Hitting generate and publishing whatever comes out — that’s ai slop, and it’s going to hurt you. Google’s February 2026 update is not the last update. Every update from here on out is going to get better at identifying content that exists solely to capture traffic rather than serve a reader.

How to Not Be Part of the Problem

The solution to the ai slop problem is not “stop using AI.” The solution is to stop treating AI output as a finished product. Here’s how that actually looks in practice.

Write from experience. The single biggest thing that separates real content from ai slop is the presence of something that could only come from a human who has actually done the thing they’re writing about. Opinions, mistakes, specific details, the thing that surprised you — AI can’t generate any of that authentically.

Treat AI output as a draft, not a deliverable. The AI gave you a structure and some sentences. Now you need to go through it and inject everything that makes it worth reading: your actual perspective, real examples, data you’ve verified, the thing you’d say to a colleague over coffee that doesn’t make it into polished corporate writing.

Add your opinion. This is the one AI genuinely cannot do. AI produces the most statistically average take on any topic. Your job is to have an actual position and defend it. If your content doesn’t have a point of view, it’s indistinguishable from ai slop even if a human wrote it.

Verify everything. Every statistic, every quote, every claim. AI hallucinations are real, they’re common, and they’re embarrassing when they get published. The two minutes it takes to check a source is the difference between content and misinformation.

If you wouldn’t put your name on it, don’t publish it. That’s the whole test. If you’d be embarrassed for someone you respect to read it, it’s not ready. Our Arsenal of WordPress tools is built around this philosophy — quality over quantity, every time.

The Bottom Line

The ai slop problem is not a technical problem. It’s a values problem. It’s what happens when people decide that producing content is more important than producing content worth reading. AI didn’t create that value system — it just gave it a machine gun.

The internet was already drowning in mediocrity before the generate button existed. AI slop is just mediocrity at industrial scale, with a smoother writing style and a faster publication cadence. The cure isn’t to abandon AI. The cure is to remember why you’re creating content in the first place — to actually help someone, answer something, say something worth saying.

That’s the entire reason AODN exists. Not to be anti-AI. To be anti-lazy. To call out the corporate slop machine that’s using AI as an excuse to stop giving a damn about quality. The web doesn’t need your 500th article on “10 tips for productivity” generated in 45 seconds and published without a second glance.

It needs your actual expertise. Your actual opinion. The thing only you can say because you’ve actually been there.

Everything else is just slop.

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