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New York
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It’s getting harder to escape slop, the artificial intelligence-generated pablum that has crept into our colleagues’ slide decks, our social media feeds, our news outlets, even our real-estate listings.
“Slop oozes into everything,” wrote the editors of Merriam-Webster, who chose “slop” as their 2025 word of the year. “Like slime, sludge, and muck, slop has the wet sound of something you don’t want to touch.”
That’s why I’m taking a moment to peer into my crystal ball and make one of those dreaded year-end predictions: 2026 will be the year of “100% human” marketing.
Hear me out.
AI “slop” tends to evoke innocuous images of “Shrimp Jesus” or big-eyed cat soap operas. But the slop imagery is getting more sophisticated, creating a crisis of confidence among even those of us who grew up with the internet and fancy themselves expert, or at least decent, spotters of fake stuff. The usual tells — unnatural lighting, awkwardly rendered hands, incongruous background images — have been largely smoothed over.
A casual scroll on TikTok now feels like a test: Did you spot the fake or did you mindlessly double-tap on that video of bunnies bouncing on a trampoline? (You know you fell for it! We all did!)
It’s a crummy feeling, being duped. And some semblance of a backlash has already begun.
Last month, the radio and podcasting giant iHeartMedia rolled out a “guaranteed human” tagline, promising users that it won’t use “AI-generated personalities” or play AI-generated music.
The San Antonio-based audio company’s own research found 90% of its listeners — even those who use AI tools themselves — want their media created by humans.
“It’s important for us to remember, as marketers, that we’re in a very delicate position within a turbulent time, both in America and around the world,” Bob Pittman, CEO of iHeartMedia, said in a statement this fall. “Consumers are not just looking for convenience — they’re searching for meaning.”
iHeartMedia is not alone. Earlier this month, the editors of The Tyee, an independent news site in Canada, published their decision to adopt a no-AI policy, saying they would not publish “journalism that is written or generated by AI.” (To be sure, it’s a small newsroom, and few if any major news outlets have made similar commitments. But several prominent newspapers that have rushed to embrace AI are now dealing with the fallout, most notably the Washington Post, which recently released a widely criticized error-ridden podcast bot.)
In Hollywood, where AI is often seen as an existential threat, some creators are driving the point home with audiences. “This show was made by humans,” read the credits of “Pluribus,” the hit Apple TV series from “Breaking Bad” creator Vince Gilligan. Others are actively rooting against “Tilly Norwood,” the AI-generated “actress” whose creators swear Tilly is more of a digital experiment and not an effort to replace human actors.
On Pinterest, the go-to site for fashion mood boards and wedding inspiration, the company’s embrace of AI is alienating its most dedicated users, as my colleague Ramishah Maruf reported last month. And across New York City, subway ads for the wearable AI recording device known as “Friend” have been the target of relentless vandalism, inspiring passersby to scrawl messages like “AI is not your friend” and “talk to a neighbor.”
One artist was so fed up with the decline of the internet, she created Slop Evader, a browser extension that filters web searches to include only results from before November 2022 — before the release of ChatGPT.
Bottom line: I could be wrong! So far, the AI pushback is tiny compared with the swath of Corporate America that’s convinced it’s the future of the entire economy. Ultimately, we’ll have to see if experiments in anti-AI marketing yield any real returns.
Still, I suspect that the more Wall Street and the C-suite opine about the brilliance of AI and its boundless potential to increase productivity and even creativity, the more many people are going to see it as a trap.
So far, our lived experience with chatbots and image generators is a mixed bag. Sure, it can be fun to tell Sora to make a video of my dog flying with Santa Claus over the Parisian skyline. And yeah, sometimes a chatbot is better than a typical web search when you need travel recommendations. But it is also a deepfake generator that can rapidly amplify misinformation (as xAI’s Grok did during the Bondi Beach shooting Sunday) and lure people into delusional, sometimes deadly spirals.
Consumers and creatives might just be starting to cry uncle. Or at least, prefer some things still made by human hands.
