Fountain of Filth No. 3

Why is AI slop?

Much has been said about AI slop: what it is, what it looks like, and why it is simultaneously so aggravating yet entertaining. However, less has been said about why AI is slop. In theory, a machine that is trained on all of the greatest feats of the human mind should have outpaced us by now; generating hilarious standup specials and captivating works of art. At least, that’s what we were promised. The reality is that almost half of all content on the internet is AI generated, and an overwhelming majority of that is slop.(1) This is not just my opinion, the general public feels lukewarm at best when confronted with AI summaries or when interacting with AI in general. (2,3) AI Slop has become so commonplace on the internet, and in real life, that ‘slop’ was  Merriam Webster dictionary’s 2025 word of the year.

So why does AI produce slop? I would argue that because AI is slop not due to some deficiency in its coding or the material that it is trained on. AI is slop because labor is what imparts value into an object, and the real purpose of these AIs is to reduce the amount of labor needed as much as possible. The value imparted from human labor is not just subjective value, like the beauty of a sculpture, but real, tangible value that we express as an amount of money. AI is at odds with this idea, because at its core AIs reduce the amount of labor needed for production, therefore reducing the value of its products to near-zero. AI slop contains so little human labor that what it produces is not just devoid of life, it lacks something more fundamental which leaves the content it creates feeling uncanny and hollow. I will be using Marx’s two fold characteristics of labor as a lens of analyzing why AI’s reduction of human labor is what makes its products so worthless. I will also be using an episode of Spongebob.

In season 4, episode 5 of Spongebob Squarepants, titled “Selling Out”, Mr. Krabs sells the Krusty Krab to a larger firm, who immediately gut the restaurant and institute a corporate bureaucracy to surveil their employees. The newly rebranded ‘Krabby O’Mondays’ appears from the outside to be a neighborhood Sport’s bar, however when Mr. Krabs returns as a dishwasher out of boredom, he slowly unveils something more unsettling beneath the surface. He greets an unusually glum Spongebob, who has been reduced to a mere technician, stacking Krabby Pattys in a large bin as they are extruded out of large apparatus and airbrushed to achieve the look of a delicious griddle-fried burger. As any fan of the series would know, Spongebob’s expertise behind the grill is at the core of the Krusty Krab experience. I want you to hold this image of the Krabby Patty in your mind. On the outside, its appearance is just the same as a burger grilled by Spongebob, however its inside reveals that when you remove the hand of the human (or sponge) from the process of production, some inherent value is lost as a result. Having his labor stripped away not only leaves Spongebob without his purpose, it reduces the iconic Krabby Patty to slop. 

Marx, in laying out his labor theory of value, identifies the socially necessary labor time as determining the value of a commodity. In basic terms, the price of a good is determined by the amount of time, on average across society, to produce it. (4) Labor, for Marx, is central to what makes a good valuable. Fundamental to his theory is the dual nature of value in commodities. For Marx, a commodity has two distinct types of value, use-value and exchange value. Use-value is simple: the use-value of a Krabby Patty is that it provides nourishment. However, in a capitalist system there is also exchange-value. The exchange value of a Krabby Patty is the quantitative value it has on the market, which is derived from how much labor is needed, on average, to produce it. Even if a Krabby Patty and a clarinet fulfill distinct use-values, namely nourishment and entertainment, if they take on average the same amount of time to produce they will have the same value, and in the view of the market, might as well be two identical things.(5) This sets up one of the core tensions within capitalism, which is that use-value is subordinate to exchange value. Under capitalism, it is not a commodity's value to humans that is important, it is its value on the market, what it can be exchanged for. 

Recall earlier the Krabby Patty from the Krabby O’Mondays. On the outside, it appeared as a normal burger, however once customers take a bite they are horrified to see what's inside. Grey slop that doesn’t even resemble food. Extruded from a machine, without human labor, and made to appear as the genuine article. This krabby patty is analogous to AI slop. With human labor removed to the greatest extent possible, we are left with images and articles that appear on the surface to be the same as any other. Under the surface, however, they contain a disgusting amalgamation of human knowledge repackaged as a new idea. Human labor is no longer the force acting on raw materials to produce a commodity, it is the raw material that is acted on by these AIs to create something devoid of humanity entirely. What's more, as LLMs have reduced the socially necessary labor time for writing, graphic design, coding, and numerous other activities to near-zero. This means that as Ai spits out ever more slop into the world, the value of everything human made is brought down with it. It has lowered the bar on what any company is willing to pay for design or copywriting or advertising to the cost of a Claude subscription. 

As humans are pushed farther and farther out of the production process, we lose our grip on the tools that shape our economic and political futures. We become even more disposable in the eyes of the capitalist than ever before. At best, some technocrats imagine a future where we are paid for simply existing. At worst, they imagine a future where they can kill the proletariat once and for all. Is that a bet we are all willing to make?

Footnotes:

1. Paredes et al., “More Articles Are Now Created by AI Than Humans.”

2.  McClain et al., “AI in Daily Life.”

3.  Eddy, “How Americans Feel about AI Summaries in Search Results.”

4.  For a more detailed explanation of the LTV, I recommend: Southerton, Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture. https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/consumerculture/chpt/value-exchange-use-value

5.  Tucker, R. C. (Ed.) (1978). The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: W.W. Norton. 308-319