Like "A quick chat designed to tell you everything you need to know about a story you don't need to know about", it says here[0]

It's been going since forever in this format, I've seen people complain about it here before but I don't really see the problem.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/pass-notes

"slop" existed before AI. It wasn't co-opted: it never specifically meant AI-generated.

While slop seems to be the popular term online, I never hear it spoken aloud. With Gen Alpha’s exposure to AI mostly through school, spoken media (youtube, tv), and their parents, “AI” probably cropped up independently as an insult

I feel "slop" is more specifically about quality of some output rather than a synonym for "bullshit" like "AI" appears to be. And like "bullshit", "AI" can mean either "not true", "poor quality", or "this/that sucks".

And "That’s so slop" sounds awkward. But mostly I think the kids haven’t even heard of "AI slop" which isn’t really in the general lexicon, at least yet. That is, the prevalence of its use in these circles is a bubble effect. I doubt anybody ever uses it in kids' Tiktoks or Youtubes or whatever.

People give 4chan far too much credit. Slop was a term that was used, maybe not widely, well before it was picked up by internet racists. Slop was used to refer to the stuff you'd feed to pigs, and if you were American, school children.

The term is a compound word joining goy, a Hebrew and Yiddish word for a non-Jew or gentile,[4][3] and slop, meaning food waste or refuse of low quality

So you're telling me that a word which has "slop" in its origins is itself the origin of "slop"?

This must be the first case of circular etymology!

It has meant the unwanted, waste food scraps dumped into a trough and eaten by pigs (the farm animal) for a lot longer than that.

I'm not sure that's the case, lots of supposed 4chan coinages came from elsewhere and 'slop' is much older. It's been known in the sense of 'liquid household refuse' from the 19th century.

That's a very dodgy etymology. The use of "slop" to refer to trashy content dates back to the late 19th/early 20th century, long before the advent of the internet.

I think our tendency to attribute "novel" word usage to 4chan might reflect more on us than on our language.

I'm a little short on primary reference material, but here's an example from 1917: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/22692/pg22692-images.ht.... Conversation on language log has at least two others from 1897 and 1920 respectively.

Before the like button, it was more individualistic. Before web 2.0, before global market penetration had hit 10%, it was mainly early adopters.

Who clicks on the clickbait? Who upvotes the garbage? Who actually sees ads and goes to buy what they didn't need? I think we all know.

The window we saw may have been one of an illusive sub-population who is forever on the treadmill trying to get away from the unwashed masses.

They didn't need facial recognition technology because they were physically in one place and the cops could just arrest everyone in that place - if there were enough cops which there never were.

I bet they wouldn’t radicalize and elect people with bad intentions in mind.

And the guys outside the AI labs are saying they won't even reach adulthood.

I hired a few contractors out of the bay area to another state where their salary was 1/3 a nice permanent home and they ended up scattering to other parts of the country. One even went back to the Bay Area. Yes there are nice places to live besides the bay area.

Why? Serious question, they completely lack the context essential to understand, the previous generation does not seem to have an improved understanding either, they are just users. Consumers of ads.

I've seen the same thing in my family and relatives across all age groups, I doubt they understand it either.

Does your age bracket, in general?

The problem with that though, they don't really get to see what great feats a healthy adult brain is allegedly capable of, for example from their parents, nor their teachers if we're being honest for a millisecond. So why bother? Offline adult brains have failed at preventing any of this - nor are they more successful. It's really not brain health that predicts success in 2026.

People actually do like AI slop. I run into older people all the time that think its beautiful and/or fun.

This is what I mean, people don't feel the same way. I find the lyrics creative enough, the style hits, that's all I'm looking for. I don't find most music on the market that interesting, anyway. I found people making music about UFOs and disclosure of all things, there isn't exactly a huge market for that. It's allowing people to express things in music they previously weren't.

This is the kind of stuff which will just cause people to be contrarian and like it because we're told it's something to be embarrassed over. People put human-created content on way too high of a pedestal.

I find it interesting that we have tools which can take a general concept and sound and create hours and hours of content out of that and I don't consider it any different than remixing human stuff, it is still human at its core.

Honestly, for the people who hate this stuff, the best thing you can do is not to mock people in this way because I promise you, that's how you get contrarians. Do you know how rude it is to be told that what you like is legitimately embarrassing? What caused you to say that to another human being? Come on!

That doesn't refute what GP is saying at all.

If it makes you feel better, it can be rephrased as:

Most of them are using AI for all their schoolwork while performatively hating it because "nobody likes AI slop" or some other half-understood meme

Everyone likes slop. That's why Instagram, Tiktok and Linkedin were so popular pre-AI.

They don't like slop when they're looking for non-slop and they recognise the slop, because it's not solving their problem. If they don't recognise the slop they'll just treat it as non-slop and use it, and in this case they arguably still liked it.

NAT and the slow adoption of IPv6 are partly to blame for this; so are phones. To host your own anything, you need a machine that can be left turned on (so a desktop fixed in one place) and an IP address.

Discord is definitely one of the big ones for their generation.

> I am more and more convinced that young people have a much better understanding of technology and especially its impact on society.

They can't even use a computer, they struggle with basic computer knowledge because they grow up with closed ecosystems and most of them only have smartphones, not a desktop PC. They are called "Digital Naives" (sic) for a reason.

You and the GP are talking about totally different things.

Also the OP is talking about elementary schoolers. Even as a future software engineer interested in computers in the pre-smartphone era, my computer knowledge in elementary school was still pretty basic.

The use of personal computers way overshot what they were designed for. Phones, primarily, and tablets for media consumption designed for. Don't mistake people putting up with the relative complexity of personal computing with them wanting it. That's why so many people no longer bother with PCs or keep an old one around just for things that need to be done and through the web. Phones, primarily, and tablets for media consumption, are much easier to use.

Try explaining a clutch and stick shift to kids. They will look at you and wonder why and how you think having a pedal that decouples the engine from the rest of the drivetrain so you can manually operate a gear lever was appropriate for a mass market product.

Every generation is full of people that have a strong aversion to tech. The mistake was thinking it would magically only be the Boomers with that problem, but I've always known people in my age group who needed that remedial tech class in college.

It did appear to improve for a little while when everyone needed a laptop or desktop to access the Internet. But smartphones have eliminated that. So have tablets. And lightweight laptops like Chromebooks have further eliminated the need for tech knowledge. I work at a K-12 school, and a surprisingly large number of young parents have access to the Internet only through their smartphones. And, truthfully, they don't need a PC to access the Internet anymore. It's an extra cost you can just bypass, and nobody under 30 with kids has spare money at this point.

But, in as much as new teachers coming into our district today are often just as tech-illiterate as those we saw 20 years ago, we haven't seen the number of tech-savvy people really decreasing, either. Tech remains a hobby for some people, and that doesn't seem to be decreasing.

Yes, we're not going to raise another generation where the techies have a common background of making MS-DOS boot disks; reading modem initialization strings; upgrading RAM requiring a chip puller or piggybacking; managing IRQs, memory addresses, or bus addressing for ISA/IDE hardware with jumpers or DIP switches; or knowing what `LOAD"*",8,1` means. But that doesn't mean people aren't learning tech, having fun with it, or making careers out of it.

They can't use a Windows-95-style filesystem for the same reason I can't use IBM-style JCL and COBOL. That is not the entire field of computing, in fact it's barely any of the field of computing which is the reason they can't use it. Just because that paradigm was once dominant, doesn't mean it still is.

Maybe the impacts but Gen Z at least the younger ones really struggle with technology. Things like file systems (even the gui kind) and the keys in a keyboard - had one ask me what’s a semicolon, he was a fully formed adult. They are not digital natives they were raised from behind the walls of the iGarden.

That's not what OP is saying.

They're saying they have a better understanding of the impact of technology, not the specifics of using technology.

I know this one you ask jev for that right?

Where do you see files and folders nowadays? They're pretty much only used by developers and some corporate offices.

It’s the opposite reason , for them social media is everything, and if that’s ai , it’s not cool , influencers don’t like it , until new ai influencers will emerge and will break a stereotype. It’s a s simple as that

I think the key is that young people get to approach new technology playfully, over-use it, and make mistakes.

I learned lessons as a teenager on Twitter in 2012 that clearly none of the middle-aged people posting constantly on the company Slack ever internalized.

I can't imagine what gave you that idea. I find there is a small slice of people who actually understand technology and it's massively underrepresented by the younger generations. They have no concept of files/folders or how the computer works at any level. Their views are often half-baked (I know mine were) and the news never actually portrays what the majority are thinking. The news is much more interested in quick hits and shock pieces "Kids are going back to dumb phones" (no they aren't), "Kids are using paper maps" (nope, a few people find them quirky and treat them as art, they aren't using them).

It's just the new term for "NPC" (like "My teacher is such an NPC"), meaning someone/something is bland or generic (like a non-playable character in a video game).

people this young don't even know all the words in your comment

Maybe, but the slop will still be painfully visible and avoided. I don't need to be told it's AI when I see a perfectly-formatted and overly-detailed comment — I already know.

This sounds like the toupee fallacy.

I wonder if any movie special effects that you notice will be considered AI?

That used to be true of autotune too. It was either tastefully hidden, or obvious and trashy. Then projects like 808s and Heartbreak and Tha Carter III put it front and center and it's been a legitimate tool ever since.

I didn't know if generative ai has a strong enough signature to go through the same evolution, but I wouldn't be shocked if it did.

You're replacing some artist and empowering others. If a single creative can gen a 3 hour movie (we'll pretend it is high-quality), then they can do things which were previously impossible. Was it not marketed as a tool which enabled people to do more?

I went to buy a new phone about a year ago - all the branding/blurbs etc was "AI this! AI that!"

I didn't end up buying at that point, but 6 months ago my existing phone failed, so I had to return to the shops. Same phones for sale more or less, but not a single word about AI anywhere.

I have heard multiple arguments that point towards this future, where AI largely becomes "normal" technology. I'm hopeful for it. There are tons of great use cases for AI, but it absolutely should not be in... everything.

This feels similar to the timeline that lots of new technologies go through. Blockchain (put that into everything!). The internet + dot com era were probably similar as well.

Treating ANYTHING like an everything tool just seems to feel this way. There's no reason I want to use AI to buy something on Amazon. Or plan a vacation for me. I absolutely want to use AI to scan through 5000 files and find that one thing I was looking for though. Different applications.

This is super naive. And does not follow any other productive technology's trajectory.

AI seems like a better derogatory adjective for most AI generated tweets, comments, blogs, reels, slop grenades that’s thrown at us these days. I wish a better adjective or slang comes along that clearly means inauthentic content

Yeah, the Guardian's "pass notes" series has been going for a while and is regularly absolute gold[0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/sep/07/death-o...

I can't wait until a model slurps this up and answer "What is AI?" with "AI is a pejorative term inferring low effort and dubious quality". Mmm-mm.

Can confirm my 8 year old uses this to roast as well.

The whole article is so AI.

And we do that and it is great but the restrictions are jarring annd absolute, and docs written for “real” web dev always assume a dev server instead. AI can at least adapt.

Same! I think our position just isn’t very interesting, so mostly we only hear from boomers or doomers. Gen Alpha seems largely outside that spectrum: ai where supports creativity, no ai where destroys creativity. The kids are alright.

Counterpoint: one could say the exact same thing about the internet, but social media has (IMHO) proved... sub-optimal at a societal level.

Can confirm my 11 year old says 'thats so AI' and means it as a slight insult.

My elementary-aged kids call AI-generated content "slop" and actively ask me if some videos on Youtube are slop before watching them. I'm proud. I think they will be able to detect AI manipulated content far better than older generations.

Found a (many years old) video of an oranutang driving a golf cart -> "dad that's AI can't believe you fell for that"

"Kids come on beans are good for you, you can't have dessert without also eating your beans" -> "That's not true beans are unhealthy you got that from AI"

Even seemingly unrelated shit "Clean your room", or "No it's time for bed your brain needs sleep" -> "that's so AI"

I suspect "That's so AI" is just the bad toupee fallacy in action. People only notice the blatant, unpolished slop and meanwhile, the seamless stuff slips right past undetected.

What's ironic is that while kids have seemingly always had a nose for the inauthentic, they have just about no way to express anything of their own identity.

Even way back in the 90s we could tell that Coca Cola isn't actually a requirement for a good Christmas, and your friends who wore platform shoes were not somehow unique.

But still, when you're young you're in a prison. There are very few things you can do that aren't connected to some corporation whose main goal is just to make money.

6yo? How much screen time do you have to have to come up with that.