It's safe to say that comedian and "Last Week Tonight" host John Oliver isn't a fan of AI slop — and he's got a compelling argument for why you shouldn't be, either.

As the comedian laid out in the latest episode of his popular HBO show, AI-generated content is suddenly everywhere online. It's going viral on social media, crowding Google Search results and discovery platforms like Pinterest, and has made churning out spam, misinformation, and otherwise empty, low-quality digital stuff easier and cheaper than ever.

The speed at which spammers and slop farmers can blast out AI content is clearly overwhelming for platforms, a problem backdropped by competing tech economy incentives: players like Google and Meta, for example, are actively trying to win the AI arms race at the same time as low-quality AI slop is polluting their existing platforms, while popular web search and discovery services writ large have generally declined to ban AI content outright. Which means that, right now, it certainly looks like slop isn't going anywhere, at least anytime soon.

As Oliver puts it, the "spread of AI generation tools has made it very easy to mass produce and flood social media sites with cheap, professional-looking, often deeply weird content."

"If that's starting to give you an uneasy feeling in your stomach right now, get used to it," he adds, "because it seems extremely likely that we're gonna be drowning in this sh*t for the foreseeable future."

As Oliver also points out, the problem isn't just that the internet is an increasingly murky, crowded place to spend time.

While some AI slop is kooky enough that it's legitimately fun, a lot of folks are having a difficult time parsing what's real from what's fake. That consensus deficit has serious implications for AI-spun misinformation, which has started to accelerate the confusion and chaos already inherent to breaking news scenarios like natural disasters and armed conflicts.

Spammers are using this gap in digital literacy around AI to their advantage, too.

Earlier this year, Futurism published a story about a slop farmer named Jesse Cunningham who uses AI to churn out fake, low-quality clickbait on social media platforms like Facebook and Pinterest. In an unlisted video we obtained, Cunningham — who was also highlighted in Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" slop segment — brags that his target audience for his churn-and-burn content is older women, who likely don't know what they're clicking on is AI. In other words, it's content like Cunningham's that's negatively impacting the livelihoods of artists, content creators, and other creatives who rely on social media and the internet to share and monetize their real, time-consuming work.

Sorry, folks: the web is melting.

More on AI slop: ChatGPT Has Already Polluted the Internet So Badly That It's Hobbling Future AI Development


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