A Definition:
Generated digital content that's vying for you attention but not worthy of it. It's worse than low quality. It's offensive pollution.
How did this happen?
AI enables content to be generated with less effort than it takes to consume. This misaligned ratio of effort is a fundamental reason AI slop exists.
This is not a new phenomenon
Humans are also very capable of making content not worthy of attention. Go to a library and pick up a random book. It's probably not very good. For this book to be here a person had to spend a significant amount of time writing every single word. Then a publisher selected this book to keep and threw away 20 other books that were not as good. Then the library chose to include this book on it's shelves. Even after all these filters most books in the library are not very good. (See Sturgeons law.)
It's no wonder AI generated content is often mindless drivel. It's missing the first basic filter: a human devoting their all-too-finite time to their creation.
What AI generates is continually remarkable and unprecedented. But now, a few years into the paradigm shift, the novelty is fading. AI is just a tool like everything else. it can be used for good.