Every ecosystem eventually breeds an invasive species, and the internet’s chosen vermin is AI slop. It’s a content-form so prolific it now has its own growth curve. Search interest in ‘AI slop’ is up by 200% on Google Trends over the last month and over 5000% in the last year, meaning either the problem is worsening, or we’ve finally found a word for what we’ve been silently suffering since 2023. Possibly both. Correlation, causation, pick your favourite – the graph goes up and to the right, much like everything else we’re being told to be alarmed about.
Taxonomists classify the natural world into kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Slop deserves the same dignity, if only so we can point at it correctly while backing away slowly. What follows is a preliminary bestiary.
Linkedinus Sunrisus (The Inspiration Leech)
Native to LinkedIn, and unable to survive anywhere with a sense of humour.
It usually announces itself with a stock sunrise over an anonymous glass office, because nothing broadcasts ‘I have wisdom to impart’ like architecture that would give an actual architect the jitters. Its mating call is a caps-locked one-word opener, ‘GRIT.’, followed by an anecdote about a janitor who taught the poster more about leadership than any MBA ever could. The janitor is fictional.
So, increasingly, is the poster.
It attaches painlessly, secreting the same anaesthetic as a real leech, so you don’t notice your feed has been feeding on you until you’re three hundred posts deep, your thumb’s gone numb, and your faith in humanity has quietly drained out through the wound. LinkedIn recently added a button to flag posts that ‘seem like AI slop.’ Patient zero is reaching for the salt.
Digitus Infinitus (The Overachieving Hand)
Once the telltale fingerprint of AI image generation – too many fingers, counted by someone who’d clearly stopped believing in limits (or digits).
The species has since evolved, growing craftier with each generation. It now hides its extra appendages in pockets, behind backs, or fuses them into a ‘confident mitten.’ Like a thief who has finally discovered gloves exist. Its rings float above where a finger should be, held up by sheer generative optimism. Sometimes, when it prays hard enough, it’s rewarded with the divine blessing of a third hand. Its cousin, Dentus Infinitus, smiles with a tooth count that would alarm a shark’s dentist.
Blogpostus Filleria (The Recipe Vampire)
Preys on anyone who types ‘banana bread’ into a search bar.
It feeds on scroll depth, luring its victims in with a 1,400-word memoir about a grandmother whose relationship with bananas is, at best, alleged. Like its folkloric namesake, it cannot enter uninvited, so it demands one paragraph at a time: a meditation on the emotional resonance of bananas, a sentence that begins ‘In today’s fast-paced world,’ four ad units, and a pop-up requesting your email as a toll for passage. Its only known predator is the ‘Jump to Recipe’ button, a wooden stake that was created after enough villagers showed up in the comments with pitchforks and torches.
Saltans Alienus (The Uninvited Dancer)
Identifiable by a single hip sway performed on faith alone. Found abundantly on Instagram Reels and TikTok, and generated onto whatever body is nearest, a mango, a Labrador, a sitting head of state. The creature is host-agnostic. Every member of the species runs the same routine, frame for frame, regardless of what body it’s landed on. But no two limbs move to the same rhythm, a coordination failure that would disqualify most species, yet this one thrives regardless. Its wild cry is a chorus from a song that already had two viral lives, exhumed for a third. It travels in swarms, arriving in your feed from sixteen different accounts before lunch. It looks harmless enough to pet. Resist the urge. You may be its next host.
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Musica Elevatoria (The Ghost Band)
Breeds exclusively inside playlists titled ‘Chill Focus Vibes,’ and travels under aliases like ‘Ambient Dreamscape.’
This creature is a band with no members, no bad breakup, no rehab story, and no soul, in either sense. It moves without sound, so you never hear it arrive. You just notice the room’s gone cold, and something synth-adjacent has been happening to you without your permission. Occasionally it attempts lyrics, a chorus about ‘chasing the light through the rain of the night,’ which means nothing but rhymes anyway. Long assumed to be some algorithmic accident, it turns out labels have bred it in captivity on purpose, having discovered that the only thing better than a hit is a hit that never asks to get paid.
Newsletteria Bulletpointus (The Takeaway Parasite)
Cannot digest an idea whole.
Breaks everything down into exactly five bullet points before consumption, each opening with an aggressive imperative verb: Leverage. Unlock. Supercharge. It has no molars for nuance, only an appetite for the executive summary. Given the entire text of Moby-Dick, it would return: ‘Key Takeaways. 1. Whales: bigger than expected. 2. Obsession: a journey, not a destination. 3. Leverage your inner Ahab.’
Field notes on conservation
It would be satisfying to call for the total eradication of slop, but a good taxonomist resists moralising about her subjects. Mostly. In fairness, none of this breeding error is really the tools’ fault. They were built to be obedient, not tasteful, and obedience, taken to its logical extreme, looks exactly like this.
This guide will be updated as new species emerge. Early candidates under observation include Podcastus Autogeneratus, two AI hosts complimenting each other’s insight for forty minutes without once landing on one, and the deeply unsettling Weddingus Speechus, first spotted at a reception near you, workshopping a toast about how ‘love is like Wi-Fi — you can’t see it, but you can feel it connect.’
The internet’s chosen vermin, as established, is thriving. Whether it survives the next decade is an open question.
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