For years now, Facebook’s feed has been drowned out by a relentless wave of AI, turning a platform that has long felt abandoned to most people under 65 into an unrecognizable digital hellscape.
Two years have already passed since we first came across the photo of “Shrimp Jesus.” This was early AI-generated junk that foreshadowed an even more nonsensical future, culminating last month with Merriam-Webster choosing “slop” as its word of the year for 2025.
Now, thanks to the advent of accessible text-to-video generators that can create footage from simple text prompts, things are going from dire to dire for Facebook and other meta platforms.
A quick perusal of the r/FacebookAIslop subreddit reveals the creepy underbelly of the world of AI slop, underscoring once again how social media feeds have gone from posts made by friends and family to endless parades of mind-boggling nonsense.
In one 50-second video circulating, what appears to be a humanoid cat is cooking a meal, while a kitten-shaped girl jumps head-first into a meat grinder and is turned into meat. The kitten’s parents were unaware and unintentionally ate the kitten, only to spit out green sludge. The mysterious video ends with the mother cat being arrested by the police and her husband’s cat sobbing on the floor.
Another clip, originally posted on Mehta’s Instagram, shows a “shark doctor” spraying white paint on a black baby and charring a white baby with a blowtorch in what appears to be a maternity ward. This clip is chock-full of inexplicably racist stereotypes. Yet another clip shows a goosebump-inducingly realistic cat with eight spider legs crawling up the side of a wall.
The sheer amount of junk that pollutes your Facebook and Instagram feeds is unlikely to go away anytime soon. Jagjit Chawla, vice president of product at Facebook, said: CNET Last year, the company’s algorithms responded to users watching specific content.
“If you, as a user, happen to be interested in AI-generated content, the recommendation algorithm will determine whether you are interested in that topic and content over time,” he said. “If you’re not interested in it, there are users who think that, for lack of a better word, that content AI is not doing well. And if you send us a signal that this isn’t for you, that algorithm will respond appropriately and prevent us from showing you any more content.”
Reading between the lines, users watching in horror as their newsfeeds transform into lifeless waves are the source of their own demise.
The company’s algorithm also responds to positive signals like likes, comments, and shares, and given that there are a lot of signals in what’s shared on Facebook, it’s no wonder you’re seeing more and more of them in your feed.
This problem goes beyond humanoid sharks and cats. 1 clip discovered by Agence France-Presse It shows US first lady Melania Trump investing $10 million to build a church and showing up “alone to decorate it for Christmas.” In another clip, singer Sabrina Carpenter is seen attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new church.
There is also obvious theft. Hollywood screenwriter Scott Collette recently noticed that an AI Facebook account was stealing his past posts and “snipping out new captions.”
In retaliation, he began “giving poison” causing a “meltdown” in the comments of the page’s followers.
Other companies have since acknowledged the AI slop problem and pledged to address the issue. YouTube CEO Neil Mohan, for example, said fighting slop will be a “top priority” this year.
It remains to be seen whether the meta will follow suit. For now, it will be up to users to decide whether they want to trudge through a barrage of AI sludge to get a glimpse of what their friends and family have posted, and therefore whether they should even bother to do so at all.
Learn more about Facebook AI efforts: Man realizes he can poison Facebook AI’s slop page to drive followers crazy
