--- title: "An Elegant Solution to AI Slop: Tax It, and Use the Resulting Billions of Dollars to Fund Cultural Institutions, Artists, and Researchers" description: "A technologist proposes slapping a \"slop tax\" on companies that use or create generative AI content." date: "2026-05-03" modified: "2026-05-03" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/tax-ai-slop" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" - "Ethics" --- # An Elegant Solution to AI Slop: Tax It, and Use the Resulting Billions of Dollars to Fund Cultural Institutions, Artists, and Researchers ![Several U.S. $100 bills are shown, with the prominent portrait of Benjamin Franklin.]() *Getty Images / Witthaya Prasongsin* If you can't beat 'em, tax 'em. AI slop is as certain as government levies these days, infecting [every corner of the internet]() and [increasingly intruding on real life](). It's not going away, and surely any attempts to ban the stuff will be futile. So what should we do about it? Well, why not institute a "slop tax?" proposes technologist Mike Pepi in an [essay for *The Guardian*](). Such a tax would "restore balance to what has heretofore been a one-way extraction," and "ensure robust institutional support structures for human creativity forced to compete in a sea of meaningless content," Pepi writes. Essentially, you shave off a little of the AI industry's bottom line to fund the arts, sciences, and other cultural institutions that they mined for free. AI slop is more than just an ugly annoyance. In Pepi's view, it's a "malicious manipulation of human cognitive labor and the institutions that support it." These billions of "facsimiles of human creativity and cognition" end up drawing resources away from actual human creatives. The "slop tax," as Pepi envisions, would work as follows: if a company "furnishes or hosts generative AI content," it's hit with an annual \~1 percent tax. "This revenue goes into a publicly controlled fund that distributes grants back to varying kinds to cultural institutions, artists and researchers — the very same groups the models used as training data." The largest AI companies are worth trillions of dollars each, so even a one percent tax will provide a windfall for cultural workers, bedrock cultural institutions, and grants for research, Pepi wrote. The interesting aspect is that the tax rate isn't high enough to be considered a punitive action, giving AI companies less to rebel against, while still providing a boatload of cash. How feasible it would be to implement a slop tax in reality is up for debate, but in Pepi's view it would more meaningfully address one of AI's catastrophic consequences, the destruction of cognitive and creative labor, than other attempts to rein in the industry. Bernie Sanders' call for a "pause" on AI, he accuses, borrows "from doomers' prognostications of a sentient artificial general intelligence — a distracting fantasy more at home in science fiction." But a "small tax on the worst parts of the industry," he says, "could unleash a cultural renaissance." **More on AI:** [*Trump Is Inflicting Massive Damage to His Public Image by Posting Offensive AI Slop*]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()