AI Slop Is Everywhere. Spotify, LinkedIn and Others Have Had Enough.

The worst of artificial intelligence slop has cluttered Google searches with recipes for glue-topped pizza, Amazon listings with sham biographies and Facebook feeds with images of Shrimp Jesus.

The digital sewage heap has sprawled across tech platforms, cheapening meaningful content and polluting the information ecosystem, as chatbots and video generators continue to advance.

Now, Silicon Valley wants to take out the trash.

Spotify, a music streamer, said it removed 75 million bulk uploads, duplicate songs and other “spammy” tracks last year — a sizable chunk of its total portfolio. LinkedIn said in July that “A.I. slop is a top priority for all of us” and developed a button for users to report it. Researchers from YouTube’s parent company, Google, described how a video service wiped 130,000 channels of low-quality content off its platform over six months.

Across the internet, tech companies are undertaking a generative waste detox, overwhelmed in many cases by the same slop first made by possible by their own A.I. tools. Mobile messaging apps, restaurant review sites, scholarly archives and dating services are all rooting out or downplaying junk generated by A.I. — many relying on the same technology to pull off the purge.

People are tiring of A.I.’s effect on the environment and its pressure on jobs and mental health. A.I. slop is just another “festering wound,” said Aidan Walker, a content creator and researcher studying online trends for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a global affairs think tank.

“Users have gradually gotten more and more upset about it,” he said. “The climate of opinion has now recognizably shifted, so these companies are finally confronting these problems.”

Generative A.I. can produce increasingly realistic images, audio and videos, but only some of it qualifies as slop. Tech companies are largely targeting the kind of low-grade clickbait that is easy to make, spread, consume and forget — the fast fashion edging out couture, the pink slime subsuming the steak.

Unchecked, the synthetic swamp online could “crowd out human creativity, corrode cultural value and destabilize public discourse,” European researchers wrote last year.

Slop has become so prevalent that Merriam-Webster, the dictionary publisher, chose it as its word of the year in 2025. Deezer, a French streaming service, said this spring that nearly half of the tracks updated to its system each day were artificially generated, many of them never heard by users. A.I. generates more than a third of what is uploaded to Apple Music.

Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said late last year that it would soon “be more practical” to trace “real media than fake media.” His observation came not long after Meta, Instagram’s parent company, rolled out an all-A.I. video stream derided by many as a showcase for slop.

Many tech companies now trying to manage A.I. slop are also the ones enabling it. In July, Meta promised to support a European pact to make A.I.-generated content more identifiable via detection, labeling and tagging. That same month, the company also released an image generator that automatically opted in public Instagram accounts as a reference for the tool. (Meta removed the feature after three days of backlash.)

“A.I. slop is a double-edged sword in that a lot of these platforms experienced upticks in engagement as a result of it,” said Paul Shovlin, an expert in A.I. at Ohio University. “But then, it got to a point where it became a liability because there’s so much flotsam and jetsam that it’s now hard for users to find the kind of quality that they’re looking for.”

Google, for example, has gone all in on A.I., linking its Gemini model to its email, maps and travel services and search. More than 20 percent of the initial short videos on YouTube served to new users are A.I.-generated slop, according to an experiment conducted last year by Kapwing, an online video editor that is powered by A.I.

One of the most popular YouTube slop channels, Kapwing estimated, earned $4.25 million annually. (It has since been suspended from a YouTube monetization program.) Neal Mohan, YouTube’s chief executive, wrote in a blog post that “managing A.I. slop” was a top priority this year.

Recently, researchers at Google considered the challenge. Rather than evaluate videos individually, they looked at upload pace, repetitive templates and other patterns that could signal coordinated abusive behavior. They found 50,000 clusters of accounts, which were removed. Some digital media experts, however, worried that the approach could overreach and also penalize legitimate content creators who publish large volumes of content.

“While academic research helps advance industry understanding, it doesn’t reflect the many layers of defense we use to enforce our policies,” YouTube said in a statement. “This includes robust safeguards to ensure well-intentioned creators using A.I. tools aren’t impacted.”

Other companies are turning to a grab bag of strategies to address A.I. slop, including rallying their own patrons to help identify it. In October, Pinterest updated its system to allow users to limit how many A.I.-generated posts they see. TikTok said it was testing a feature in the United States that lets people dial up or down the amount of visible A.I. content. (The company also said it had automatically labeled more than three billion A.I.-generated videos.) TikTok removed more than 377,000 videos in the first three months of the year for violating its A.I. policies.

A.I. was used to create nearly half of the posts with more than 50 words on X, Elon Musk’s social media platform, according to Pangram, an A.I. detection start-up. To deal with “a tremendous amount of A.I. slop & reply spam,” the social media platform this year banned apps that effectively encourage bots to post by paying for content, wrote Nikita Bier, who was X’s head of product until this month. .

Chris Best, the chief executive of Substack, wrote last month that “it’s getting harder to tell what’s real on the internet,” and that “platforms that reward fakeness will create a race to the bottom.” The newsletter platform announced its own A.I. detection tool for users, powered by Pangram, which is designed to scan replies, comments and posts longer than 100 words and decide whether they were likely written by hand or with A.I. help.

Some newsletter writers complained that the tool mistook posts written by humans as A.I.-generated, did not account for A.I.’s potential role in the creative process and put undue pressure on authors to defend their reputations against an opaque metric.

This spring, Camille François and nearly two dozen other A.I. experts convened at a Slop Salon event in Menlo Park, Calif., where they discussed the difficulty of cl***ifying, and thus managing, A.I. slop.

“The hodgepodge of tactics is a symptom that we’re looking at a systemic problem with our information environment and not just a bad cl*** of content called slop that we can just define and remove,” Dr. François, who studies harmful digital technologies at Columbia University, said in an interview. “A.I. is a creativity tool at the end of the day, and multifaceted, and platforms that handle this in a poor way will see people walk and go to other places.”