How to Win the War Against AI Slop

It only took a few days into 2026 before we witnessed a cascade of generative AI failures that underscore the fragility of our online ecosystem. From the jump, Grok began generating millions of non-consensual images and AI-generated CSAM, disseminating them widely on X without meaningful resistance. AI-generated disinformation regarding the capture of Nicolas Maduro and his wife in Venezuela flooded every major social platform, unchecked and unmoderated, creating real-world confusion in moments.

Perhaps most telling were the responses from industry leaders. The head of one of the world's largest social platforms publicly admitted that even he can no longer distinguish real from fake on his own feeds, effectively waving a white flag. Meanwhile, the CEO of another tech giant argued that we should stop talking about "slop" entirely, dismissing it as a distraction.

They are decidedly wrong. "AI slop"—the low-quality, often deepfake-driven, or deceptive content filling our feeds—is not a side effect we must accept. It is a solvable problem, and 2026 can be the year we finally solve it.

The Industrialized Noise Machine

When we talk about "AI slop," we aren't simply talking about weirdly smooth images or engagement bait designed to keep you scrolling. We are talking about a systemic pollution of the digital ecosystem that lends frightening truth to the "Dead Internet Theory." As of right now, this content makes up a sizable double-digit percentage of all material online. It manifests as misinformation that helps destabilize order and democracy, empowers sophisticated social engineering attacks that bypass legacy security, and floods the internet with a ridiculous amount of text generated solely to chase SEO algorithms rather than human readers.

If there is a medium, AI slop exists there to the detriment of everyone, clogging customer service lines and complicating how we verify identity.

That is not to say that I am against Artificial Intelligence; we are staunchly pro-AI, believing in responsible innovation and knowing that generative AI holds the potential to cure diseases, solve inequality, and radically improve the human condition. We celebrate those advancements and will champion the companies and teams building them.

Yet AI slop is not innovation, but a distortion. It is a parasite on the promise of artificial intelligence, serving only to distort reality and erode trust. Unfortunately, the majority of social platforms have no financial incentive to stop it because it drives engagement and ad revenue—often at the user's expense.

A Defense for the Digital Age

Contrary to the defeatism we've heard from some tech leaders, detection and prevention of this content has existed for quite some time. We have spent years building a multi-model defense network capable of identifying deepfakes and generative content across audio, video, image, and text. Yet we also realize that a single company cannot secure the entire internet alone. The scale of the problem demands a distributed defense and coordinated efforts. Partnerships between solutions such as ours, our contemporaries, researchers in the space, lawmakers, and other stakeholders will be what solves the problem of AI slop.

This realization of the need for cross-company collaboration drove us to open our doors last year, when we launched our public API. We opened our doors because we know trust shouldn't be a luxury good; it needs to be available to every developer. We know that technology alone is not a silver bullet, but this represents a crucial shift in tactics. By placing these capabilities into the hands of individual builders, we are opening a new front in the wider war against digital pollution.

This is just the start of one battle in a long, difficult campaign to reclaim our shared reality. It won't happen overnight, but by embedding verification into the bedrock of the internet—making the rejection of synthetic garbage as routine as filtering spam—we can finally stop retreating and start pushing back.

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The apathy of major platforms is not a permission slip for the rest of us to give up hope. This year, we have a choice. We can accept a digital world where authenticity is a scarce resource, or we can build the infrastructure of trust that makes the internet usable again. This is the year we—as technologists, users, and human beings—draw a line in the sand. We have the technology. We have the mandate. We can turn the tide against the noise and get back to a world that is a lot less sloppy.