A TikTok account sharing AI-generated videos of explosions and burning cities has disappeared from the platform. But the type of content it hosted — what experts call “AI slop” — is still going strong.
TikTok is pulling back on an AI feature that went haywire
TikTok is pulling back on an AI feature that added wildly inaccurate text summaries to videos from users like Charli D'Amelio and Shakira.
The TikTok AI Slop Report
New research from Kapwing reveals that nearly 60% of TikToks served to new users and children are AI slop. But which categories and tags are the worst affected — and what does this landscape look like to kids?
Everyone's very angry online right now
Read to the end for a truly incredible TikTok video
A photo of Iran’s bombed schoolgirl graveyard went viral. Why did AI say it wasn’t real?
Numerous faked images and a string of startlingly inaccurate responses from Gemini and Grok are part of a tidal wave of AI slop engulfing coverage of the Iran war
Aral Balkan (@aral@mastodon.ar.al)
Want an update on the Weekend at Bernie’s clown show that is W Social? No? Me neither, but here we are… So before we start, let’s recount the whole dystopian raison d’être of these Davosian clowns: to be a EU®opean “alternative to X” that – cue the 1984 theme tune – verifies your identity to ensure that only “real people” are on it (real is what your government says it is). Now, let’s fast forward to last week, when TikTok set up an account on W Social. That’s nice, isn’t it? One surveillance capitalist lending their support to another? Kumbaya and all that. The only problem? (spoiler alert), it wasn’t TikTok. (Shocking, I know.) The account, Identity Verified™ by EU X – sorry, W Social, was a spam account and immediately labelled as such by BlueSky moderators. (Don’t you love a “decentralised” system where a post on an EU server, accessed from another EU server, is moderated by our benevolent Big Brother in Trumpland, by the way? I know it just warms the cockles of my heart. So much sovereignty! But I digress…) So @_elena@mastodon.social calls them out (someone has to while @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu is busy preparing for their honeymoon after expressing their undying devotion to W Social recently on every social platform¹): https://mu.social/profile/elenarossini.com/post/3mqob7shxks2t Anna Zeiter – W CEO, Stanford’s own, and ex-eBay executive (such sovereignty) – replies with this absolute zinger: > “We are just verifying if some [sic] is a human and at least 18 years old. Users are then free to choose their own user name. This (human) user apparently chose the name TikTok.“ (https://mu.social/profile/anna.wsocial.eu/post/3mqoepm7m2k2z) Read that as many times as you like until it really sinks in. These incompetent clowns (dangerous competent clowns but incompetent clowns nevertheless) make people go through a ridiculous 13-step identity verification stage² and then… umm… you get to choose whatever identity you want. 🤡🤡🤡 Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they’re incompetent. It would be worse if they were competent, given they’re a closed-source venture-capital-funded startup determined to prove your identity. > “Yes we have a business model, it’s not a philanthropy, we are not a B corp, we actually want to make money.” – Anna Zeiter³ But, what I want to know is this: Why has @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu embraced a proprietary, closed-source, corporate ghost town with 14,300 accounts, 90% of which have not posted even once (in other words, with only 1,259 accounts that have ever posted)⁴ when there is a thriving non-corporate fediverse with millions of active people on it. Could it have anything to do with identity verification, surveillance, and control? And if so, why can’t they even get that right? Looking forward to seeing how long @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu can drag the corpse of W Social around before people realise it’s dead. Oh, and how does this make the whole “European alternatives” thing look? Not good. Not because there aren’t excellent European alternatives but because the folks at the commission are either too clueless or too corrupt to recognise and support them. So, yeah, how’s your Monday going? ¹ e.g., https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/116770333053823108, etc. ² https://aseachange.com/@elena/statuses/01KVD55YBYVM3B46ACQTECDMT2 ³ https://blog.elenarossini.com/the-untold-story-about-w-social-unconventional-beginnings-strategic-pitches-conflicting-signals/ (from the YouTube video that they since deleted. Nice transparency there, clowns.) ⁴ Run this script in Node 18+ to reproduce the numbers from their PDS yourself: https://codeberg.org/aral/gists/src/branch/main/wsocial-pds-stats.js Also see https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-a-broken-ghost-town/ and https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-fictional-metrics-and-the-beauty-of-open-data/ #WSocial #EU #sovereignty #socialMedia #socialNetworking #mastodon #fediverse #activityPub #ATProto #startups #EUCommission
AI Slop is Killing Online Communities
Like a young child coming home from kindergarten with their latest crayon scrawls, the internet is currently awash with people sharing their AI-generated work. And just like the young child’s drawings, much of that work should be proudly put up on the walls within the artist’s house—and no further.
Musk’s Grok AI Generated Thousands of Undressed Images Per Hour on X
Elon Musk’s X has become a top site for images of people that have been non-consensually undressed by AI, according to a third-party analysis, with thousands of instances each hour over a day earlier this week.
Data Streaming for AI: From Extractive Training to Sovereign Infrastructure DWeb Camp 2026
AI systems are consuming the world's content without compensating its creators. This session explores data streaming as a new paradigm — where content flows to AI in real time, with built-in rights management, usage tracking, and fair compensation — and asks what it would take to make this infrastructure decentralized, sovereign, and governed by the communities it serves.
TikTok and the Evolution of Digital Blackface
On the app, users drape themselves in the trappings of Black culture—and steal the viral spotlight. It’s exploitation at its most refined and disturbing.
AI CVE Slop: The Crisis Drowning Open Source Security
The proliferation of AI-generated vulnerability reports — commonly termed “AI slop” — has emerged as one of the most significant…
Google research shows the fast rise of AI-generated misinformation | CBC News
From fake images of war to celebrity hoaxes, AI technology has spawned new forms of reality-warping misinformation online. New analysis co-authored by Google researchers shows just how quickly the problem has grown.
AI code and software craft - alex wennerberg
Much has been said about audio, video and text "slop": low-quality, AI-generated content that has proliferated on the internet since the release of publicly-accessible AI models. Garbage content has always existed online, but the novelty of AI is that it has made its generation orders of magnitude less labor-intensive. For anyone who lacks a discerning eye, or is doing some task where discernment simply does not matter, AI has become a sufficient replacement for human hands.
AI-generated ‘slop’ is slowly killing the internet, so why is nobody trying to stop it? | Arwa Mahdawi
Low-quality ‘slop’ generated by AI is crowding out genuine humans across the internet, but instead of regulating it, platforms such as Facebook are positively encouraging it. Where does this end, asks Arwa Mahdawi
Elon Musk's Grok AI Is Pushing Misinformation and Legitimizing Conspiracies
Grok's selling point is real-time access to news, but Motherboard found that it generated inaccurate information about Israel-Palestine and lent credence to conspiracy theories.
The AI Slop Backlash Is Actually Having an Impact
Platforms are finally recognizing that people don’t want to consume AI slop. A growing number of sites and apps now have tools and policies to flag, label, and ban AI-generated content.
Israel-Iran conflict unleashes wave of AI disinformation
Fake AI videos relating to the conflict have gained over 100 million views online, BBC Verify finds.
