Pretty much the entirety of advertising always has been, especially since the fall of the fairness doctrine. With the rare exception of ad agencies that are making artworks to try and win awards once in a while.
this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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In art, this fellow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kinkade
It's the only Wiki entry on an artist that I've seen with no examples of his work. The nearest is a photo of a photo of Kinkade with one of his paintings.
I'm not being snobbish - it does give me the same vibe as AI generated images touted as art. Nostalgia, colour saturation, cliché, all dialled up to the max. The man died in 2012 but lives on as a brand.
That's a really good example, just a mix and regurgitate of older, better work trying to give consumers what they think they want.
Marvel movies
Every annual-ized video game. 2K, Fifa, Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed. Copy and paste, low effort trash that offers nothing new, different, or interesting. They're designed to be as bland and disposible as possible, to keep you addicted for a year and selling you loot boxes and additions until the next edition comes out.
Fast fashion.
Anything found on aliexpress, temu or wish. Manufactured trash/industrial runoff that's likely dangerous to breathe near.
Television news. In fact, most of the shit on television these days.
The idea cancer for toddlers section of youtube, which I think they have since cleaned up. The "finger family pregnant elsa kills hitler spiderman" era. Which was kind of fascinating to study, because no one was in charge. iPad children weren't making decisions, they were just letting the colors and sounds happen, and actual people deciding to make the content, sometimes to the point of wearing costumes and shooting live video, were making what the algorithm deemed popular. At least one woman pulled a bright blue dress over a fake baby belly while her husband scribbled a toothbrush mustache on a Spiderman mask and didn't think "What the hell are we even doing right now?"
Reaction videos - prime example of slop. WHO DAFUQ WATCHES THESE? Like, am I going crazy by not getting this? Why would I watch some person just sit there and react to shit, often exaggerating their reaction to get attention of a watcher, that brings literally 0 fucking worth to the original content?
Prank videos - only are second to reaction videos. 99% of the time are either fake or they do some questionable stuff to expectorating bystanders.
I dont mind them when the reactor is a specialist (like a physicist or chemist or something) who normally produce their own content reacting to a realted thing. Pure react channels are pretty trash tho
Reaction videos can be done right. There's a vocal coach on Youtube who listens to and comments on the vocal techniques in use in famous songs, the most fun ones are the ones she's never heard before. It's also really easy to do this kind of content lazily, play someone else's video and remember to say "oh shit" occasionally.
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Art pieces that are made and sold as little more than money laundering schemes. Playing GTAO again and am kinda surprised out of all the money laundering operations you can run, a bogus art gallery isn't one of them.
YouTube channels that are mostly just reading Reddit comments.
Similarly, youtube channels about disaster events that are just reading the Wikipedia page with some spooky music.
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low effort, low quality, for making money because of it. Might not have either low effort or quality "tag" at times, but then its replaced by being harmful, which can be there with them too. So things like what fastfood companies squeeze out, tiktok content, illegal drugs, temu trash.
So maybe also anything that actively exploits humans in some way for monetary gains (ai exploits and harms creators, fastfood and drugs exploit and harm body, tiktok trash exploits and harms mind, temu trash exploits western economy and harms environment).
so in short, shit that would make world better place with its absence
Short form video comedy with cringy facial expressions synced to music is my most hated example
shorts, ads, fast food
"Silverberg's Law"
Someone once asked science fiction writer Robert Silverberg why 90% of the SF stories they read were crap.
Silverberg replied that 90% of everything is crap.
And that's why older media is usually better. Only the good parts have survived and the 90% has been forgotten.
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The "cooking blog" style where a simple answer to a simple question has to be padded with eight paragraphs of garbage. Like, I just want to know how to put a comment in a YAML file. I don't need a table of contents for this, I don't need to hear a brief history of how the comment was invented, just tell me the character to type.
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Super Hero movies
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almost anything Disney produces these days.
I'd say more specifically, Disney's live action remakes of their old films are slop. Though I've not watched a Disney film since Turning Red, they've not seemed appealing for a while now.
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SEO slop is the first thing that comes to mind. It's super-charged in ubiquity with AI now, but it's been a thing about as long as search engines.
Sometimes you land on a page and you can tell you're only there because they loaded it with keywords, repeating the same phrases you searched for in every variation.
SEO is actually one of the things that started me thinking about this. Although those dumb overly long cooking blogs were (previously) written by humans, the incentives led to a style that was no longer genuine. Much worse were those shameless fake review sites that existed solely to promote some VPN or antivirus. Sure, a human might've put that together, but so many words with so little regard for meaning.
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The absolute epitome of non-AI slop has got to be these creepy videos that were on YouTube back in ~2017:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate
Its exactly the kind of thing you'd expect would be the product of AI, but it actually came before AI. I think a lot of it was procedurally generated though, using scripts to control 3D software and editing software, so different character models could be used in the same scenes and different scenes could be strung together to make each video.
I think a similar thing happens with those shovelware Android games. There's so many that are just the same game with (incredibly poorly done) asset swaps that I think they must just make a game once and then automatically generate a thousand+ variations on it.
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DropShipping. Basicly everything made in China
If we want to really strech it: plastic. We should have never invented plastic. The world would be a better one
Plastics are wonderful in certain use cases. Medical, yes please. Automotive, sure. Several layers of packaging on a plastic toy that's also bound together with plastic wire, no thank you.
Background music for all advertising during the holiday seasjinglejinglejingle jazzybellsbellsbellsbells BING BANG BONG BING DING DANG DONG although I suspect this is increasingly AI slop at this point
Most phone apps, a lot of modern software, SEO bullshit, the current web, virtually every show, the vast majority of Hollywood films, a lot of the music that makes it to the charts, influencers' "content", adverts, the overwhelming pile of crap that no one buys on Steam, lots of AAA games that too many people buy on steam, the poorly-written bottom of the barrel fanfiction that passes as books, and a depressing amount of stuff posted on social media, including this comment.
Yes, I am grumpy today, why do you ask?
Yes, I am grumpy today, why do you ask?
Ignorance is bliss.
100 years of video advertising. Here let me rub this on your eyeballs.
Shovelware video games could be included in the slop category.
Also included in this: the thousands upon thousands of mobile games that are literally the same exact game with minor asset switching.
Like, 99% of those "town/castle/whatever building" games that have fixed locations for buildings etc., they're all based on maybe 2-3 white label game "engines" that are ready to be re-labelled with new assets, new logos, new story (even though the story events driving it are the same, the "side dish" storytelling changes minimally).
This also goes for pretty much any game format that becomes trending. You can bet your tushie that the moment a game format is even just borderline popular... there will be a dozen or so Chinese software houses copying the mechanics and looks and behaviour, and within a week you can buy a white label version of it for a few thousand dollars.
Hallmark Christmas movies are proto-slop. Same goes for Lifetime Original movies. Example with Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig, literally doesn't feel real.
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- Funko pops
- those Hong Kong ninja movies from the 80s that mixed chinese movies and ninja scenes
- food that lost all taste and is basically salt, sugar, water and/or fat
- any movie franchise or TV show that has a 37th sequel or season
- The Loudness War in music
- Fast Fashion
those Hong Kong ninja movies from the 80s that mixed chinese movies and ninja scenes
You shut your whore mouth, those chopsocky films are a treasure! The difference in quality and how the stories barely go together are some of the appeal of those movies. It's really cool how far some creators go to make their movie and have everything sorta be a somewhat cohesive narrative.
Shit like Kung Pow are great examples of the genre being done very well (even as a parody).
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Liberty Mutual’s commercials are utter non-sense, no plot, not funny.
Please make them stop the slop.
Amazon. It's a gigantic warehouse of slop
The Jerry Springer Show
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