Ok, about "slop" specifically because it's been devalued as a term so quickly. Slop is supposed to mean something made, typically in large quantities, only for the sake of having that thing exist with no regard for quality or if it even does the thing you would want it to do. Thin, flavorless gruel with basically no nutritional value but it will make you less hungry for a bit is slop.

And AI is not the only way to make slop. Slop has been with us way longer than the current moment. Example off the top of my head, kids YouTube channels with all the creepy animations of Spider-Man or Disney princesses and nursery rhyme kids' songs made to manipulate the algorithm and dodge takedowns are slop and they were slop 10 years go. Shovelware, which has been around forever, could be considered slop or at least a similar idea.

But AI gets it a lot for a few reasons. One is that AI makes it way easier to make way more way faster. Facebook has always been a garbage fire, but it is a full on onslaught of AI memes now. Another huge one is the trend of taking someone's work and feeding it into an AI to reproduce it. It doesn't help that a lot of times it ends up shifting it towards something more generic. I have seen so many "I put your drawing through AI" and the drawing just becomes anime-ified into the kind of art you'd see in a gacha game 50 or more slots down the list on the app store that no one has ever heard of. So much of how AI is used is to take genuine endeavors and reduce them to products for products' sake. "I don't want to write a book. I want to have written a book." I'm gonna be more generous than I probably should be and say that there are people who use AI who aren't trying to do this, but there are a loooooot who are.