I started ordering books from Amazon back when ALL they sold was books (between 1995 and 1998). I still primarily order books from them – even though they now sell practically anything.
I am generally extremely skeptical of “customer reviews” at any online shopping site. I don’t know these people. Why should I be persuaded by them? If a product has a lot of negative reviews it could just be from the fact that unhappy people are more likely to write a review. Positive reviews could be written by a PR company hired by the seller. Nowadays we don’t even know if the reviews are actually written by real people!
AI at Amazon
Recently, I noticed something new on the Amazon product description page. Above any of the actual customer reviews, is an AI-generated “summary” of what the customer reviewers said. For book reviews, the Amazon AI typically says, “Customers said this… They describe the story as… They appreciated that… However some feel…”
In other words, the AI summary lets us know that some customers liked the book, and others did not. (!!!) How is that helpful – or even meaningful – to a potential reader (or customer)?
If you are going to make purchasing decisions based on previous customer recommendations, you need to at least read their actual recommendations. But beware, many of those could be written by AI as well!
AI in Google search
Now Google search is getting into the AI game. For a while now, Google has been including an “About” box on the right-hand side of your search results page. Often this Google “summary” explanation of your search term is directly taken from Wikipedia – so you can decide for yourself how accurate you think it might be.
If your search is for a product, the “About” box is replaced by a “Sponsored” box with links to sellers of the product. If you search for a definition, you will get one from Oxford Languages and/or Merriam Webster.
However, if you ask a Google a question, you will now sometimes get an “AI Overview” answer. At the bottom of the answer, in small type, Google still has the disclaimer that “Generative AI is experimental,” but it is all too common for people who turn to Google for answers to assume the answer they get is accurate and authoritative.
Slop is replacing authentic content
Slop: a term of art, akin to spam, for low-rent, scammy garbage generated by artificial intelligence and increasingly prevalent across the internet—and beyond.
-Max Read
Writer Max Read calls AI-written internet content “slop.” He points out that slop is increasingly overrunning the internet with weird, error-prone, poorly-written, garbage and creepy, disconcerting, fake pictures and “art.”
A rising tide of slop has begun to swamp most of what we think of as the internet, overrunning the biggest platforms with cheap fakes and drivel, seeming to crowd out human creativity and intentionality with weird AI crap.
-Max Read
Publishers report being overwhelmed with submissions of bland, AI-written, manuscripts. Music platforms are increasingly playing dull, unoriginal, AI-created, music. Actors and actresses are finding photos of their heads attached to anonymous bodies. And people continue to buy, watch, read, and share this slop eagerly – with little to no awareness or concern about the danger.
Loss of trust
What’s gone from the internet, after all, isn’t “truth,” but trust: the sense that the people and things we encounter are what they represent themselves to be.
-Max Read
As an English teacher, I taught my students how to identify reputable, fact-based, professionally edited, source information. As a school librarian, I taught students how to evaluate, categorize, organize and properly use the information they receive.
Everyone needs these skills now more than ever. We are allowing social media and AI to turn our brains into mush.
When you look through the reams of slop across the internet, AI seems less like a terrifying apocalyptic machine-god, ready to drag us into a new era of tech, and more like the apotheosis of the smartphone age — the perfect internet marketer’s tool, precision-built to serve the disposable, lowest-common-denominator demands of the infinite scroll.
-Max Read
Consider this
How much time do you spend each day scrolling through useless internet slop? Does it make your life better? Do you really feel wiser, better educated, and better informed after each “doom scrolling” session?
How good are your information literacy skills in distinguishing slop from accurate information? Do you really know how to evaluate a source of information for clarity, accuracy, usefulness, timeliness, and fairness?
The world would be a much better place if people would stop wallowing in social media slop and spend their time doing something genuinely useful, or helpful, or productive, or creative, or inspiring. At the very least, we should try to only consume media that is created by actual people!
When we need information, we should deliberately and consciously choose meaningful, useful, fact-checked, edited, legitimate, reputable, “mainstream,” sources of information. Information value and shock value are usually at opposite ends of the truth spectrum. There would be much less internet slop if we simply stopped giving it our rapt attention.
Sources:
Max Read, “We’re in our slop era,” Substack, September 25, 2024.
Andy, “Business, Hum, More Power, more money,” Andys Theory, Tribel. January 7, 2025.
Max Read, “Drowning in Slop: A thriving underground economy is clogging the internet with AI garbage – and it’s only going to get worse,” New York Magazine, September 25, 2024.
Max Read, “How Much of the Internet is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.” New York Magazine, December 26, 2018.