Thanks for joining us! You are, no doubt, a sophisticated, thoughtful, and good-looking contemporary Internet user! And as such, you’ve likely noticed an AI spike in your online diet! Much like fillers and colors and sugars of various kinds fill our physical bodies with empty and unwholesome caloric content, so our current use of web technologies has become bloated with content created by generative AI apps and processes! Not to be too precious about it, but all of this sloppy, greasy AI content makes its way into our brains and/or minds! And so we’re taking a few moments with this episode to speak to the slop and at least call it out for what it is! The first step in fixing a problem is recognizing you have a problem, to quote many a recovery program!

The EnT: bringing you online self-awareness since 2022! #ednontech

If AI helped create this audio, we’re likely morally culpable but probably not directly responsible! #ednontech

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When searching for Microslop, the search engine kept primarily giving me links to MicroSoft.

AI tools, while offering unparalleled efficiencies in paper drafting and peer review, also introduce notable ethical concerns.

Carobene, A., Padoan, A., Cabitza, F., Banfi, G., & Plebani, M. (2024). Rising adoption of artificial intelligence in scientific publishing: evaluating the role, risks, and ethical implications in paper drafting and review process. Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (CCLM), 62(5), 835-843.

AI “slop” is an increasingly popular term used to describe low-quality AI generated text, but there is currently no agreed upon definition of this term nor a means to measure its occurrence.

… market conditions inherent to a “market for lemons” have been introduced into the online marketplace for quality text-based works because of the sudden influx of works generated by large language models.

The bleak nature of these findings may lend credence to Luddite leanings and perhaps provoke a readoption of the typewriter.

Tullis, J. (2025). Sifting Through the Slop: How Generative AI Created a Market for Lemons for Text-Based Works. Available at SSRN 5266660.

The publishers’ cocktail of probability, prediction, and profit is predicated on the same process: extract our scholarship and behavior, then sell it back to us in congealed form.

Pooley, J. (2024). Large language publishing: The scholarly publishing oligopoly’s bet on AI. KULA, 7(1), 1-11.

The surge of scholarly output, enabled by advanced digital infrastructures, open-access models, and mega-journals has fueled not only greater access and collaboration, but also mounting information overload, declining editorial standards, and the evolution of a research workforce that spends more and more time chasing metrics.

Enslopification … involves the creation of large amounts of low-effort, poor-quality content using AI (ie.-“slop”), driven by incentives that reward quantity over quality and amplified by algorithmic systems that promote popular patterns regardless of their actual value.

Lang, C., Moffett, C., & Vasudevan, L. (2025, November). The Architecture of Academic Overproduction: Toward Post-AI Scholarship. In Interdisciplinary Science and Research Conference on Digital Humanism (pp. 483-498). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.

Slop

How can AI slop be reduced in the creation of knowledge?

Critical discernment in terms of information literacy

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The primacy of human involvement in the endeavour

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Ever seen a Hallmark Christmas movie?

Will we leave the last place burning?
Or do we just get leaving?
Red-light,
Red-light my mind moves to refuse that filter,
Are you still surprised? #ednontech