Grady Simon bio

Slop is content without grounding

April 04, 2026

“Slop” is often used to refer generically to any AI-generated content. I don’t think this quite captures the deeper meaning of the term.

Slop is content without grounding. It’s content that doesn’t bear information about anything we care about.

“Ground” suggests something firm, something you can stand on, something that can only be changed through costly effort.

Non-slop could be grounded in an author’s genuine, heartfelt perspective. This is a form of grounding because we presume the author formed this perspective through costly acquisition of experience or knowledge, and the author’s view can’t easily be changed. In the past, all content was costly to create, and thus its existence was a proof of work of the author’s investment in the content, a hint that it is grounded in something meaningful to the author, and so perhaps also to us.

Non-slop could also be grounded in correspondence to objective reality. Software that correctly and parsimoniously models something isn’t slop, even if it was generated by AI. Parsimony is important in correspondence-based non-slop because anything superfluous is necessarily ungrounded.

Content can be interesting but still be slop. AI slop videos are interesting but they lack this correspondence to anything meaningful. That combination of interesting but meaningless is in fact the essence of AI slop videos.

That AI slop videos can actually be entertaining while text-based slop almost never is tells us something else about the dynamics of slop. Reading takes effort. We expect to be rewarded for the expenditure of the effort entailed in reading with the satisfaction that we’ve connected with something real or artful. Since watching videos takes much less effort, we don’t mind the lack of grounding and are willing to accept the less elevated reward of mere entertainment.

This definition of slop as ungrounded content doesn’t make any direct reference to AI. Easy, AI-powered generation of content about anything is one way to end up without grounding, but slop has existed as long as there have been reasons to produce content that isn’t grounded in anyone’s genuine interest in the subject. Advertising, marketing copy, Victorian serial novels, and filler television are all slop.

This video is not AI-generated. It was posted in November 2024, before video generation was quite this high fidelity. “Animals doing cute and somewhat implausible things” is a major subgenre of AI slop videos today though. So is this slop?

Slop is a spectrum. Grounding is a matter of degree. To the extent this is mindless and meaningless entertainment content, grounded in no real purpose, it’s slop. It does purport to depict real beaver behavior though – that even beavers who have never seen their parents dam still have the instinct to dam. So in that sense, it can’t be slop to the same degree as the bouncy cat dough blobs above.

So when deciding whether to label something slop, the right question isn’t whether it was AI-generated, but rather whether it’s grounded in anything. Slop is free-floating content, unmoored to any interesting aspect of reality. Consuming it makes you feel the unease and frustration I imagine astronauts feel when they’re stuck in the middle of room in zero-G with nothing solid to push off or pull themselves toward.