Word of the Year: AI Sludge

Toxic AI Sludge / Image: Badly edited by author

The ‘Word of the Year’ is a silly and often controversial bit of social commentary. What once seemed to be a way of spotlighting bigger issues in the world — previous words from the Oxford University Press include Credit Crunch and Carbon Footprint — seems to have descended into an exercise in picking the word that appeared the most on viral social media clips. Looking at you, Rizz.

Collins, which announced its word a few weeks ago, chose 'Brat.' Of course, it refers to a particular use case of the word Brat Summer (and not the sausage, though a sausage summer sounds delicious). I'm not even going to try and explain what that is or was because I don't doomscroll enough brain rot to know, and, truthfully, I don't give a fuck either. Today, the Oxford Dictionary announced its shortlist, also choosing Brain rot, as well as dynamic pricing, demure, romantasy, lore and slop.

I like slop. It’s a fitting term for the torrent of subpar AI content we’ve seen of late. But it doesn’t pack enough punch. It doesn’t convey the sheer weight of the problem. For me, there is a term that better encapsulates the year, especially in the context of creativity and the future of the Internet —

Sludge.

More specifically, AI Sludge.

It's been a year of GenAI going turbo, with seemingly every company, organization, platform, tech overlord, and creator adopting the technology into their practices—whether it makes sense to do so or not.

This has resulted in almost every facet of our Internet and online experience being polluted with generated AI sludge. 

Where to even begin? We've seen social media platforms swamped with trash AI-generated images of dead children and Jesus shrimp statues, often followed by a swathe of boomers commenting below. The AI spam has been getting more sophisticated, too, with entirely AI-generated profiles that post entirely AI-generated content. Navigating these platforms has become harder, with huge percentages of comments now spat out by a bot, either just repeating the text in the OG post or writing something bland like "this is great!" and search features now return AI results. It's already gotten to the stage where AI profiles are interacting with each other, and with chief trend-chaser Mark Zuckerberg already confirming Meta plans to start showing AI-generated content in its feeds, the downward spiral is only going to speed up.

Then we've got search results, perhaps the most prime example of how to fuck up something in pursuit of increasing shareholder dividends. Google search, a core pillar of the Internet, is completely broken. Instead of delivering results that are useful, it now slaps generated AI overviews front and center that pull from Reddit as a source of truth. Google is quickly becoming the spam it spent the last 20 years trying to fight. And don't get me started on image results, which, if you wish to find something that isn't AI-generated, well, good luck. It's even the same for genuine stock image websites that seem to think it makes sense to flood their feeds with slop rather than promote actual images taken or created by actual humans. 

We've gotten weird, creepy chatbots that are causing people to turn to lines of code for relationships, friendships and guidance, a recipe for disaster that will lead to societal consequences. We've had really shit hardware devices that want to fill your everyday existence with prompts. We've got the entire education system struggling to manage the wave of plagiarism and prompt-generated papers. We have people self- diagnosing themselves with ChatGPT or using it as a therapist, taking its word as gospel. 

The sludge is everywhere you look. 

It's happening across almost all mediums: writing platforms, media sites, music platforms and many other forms of creativity. It's bleeding into politics and social issues, into our news, into our sources of truth. And all for what? What have we really gotten in return? The ability to do a few things faster but at lesser quality and without any of the quirks that make human output beautiful? 

As the sludge continues to spread, it consumes everything it touches. What's left is an Internet with a reduced pool of original, human-created content that's now being churned out by AI programs over and over, diluting the quality each time. The results get popped back into the training data sets for the LLMs to train on again. 

That's the scary thing. It's only going to get worse. 

The quantity of AI content is going to increase — some believe as much as 90% of content on the Internet could be AI-generated as soon as next year; one expert even believes this could be 99-99.9% by 2030 — and the quality of the content is only going to decrease. LLMs have started to reach the point where progress is slowing between model updates. They are facing the existential crisis of having to train off their own shit content as it ate everything else up (without permission or payment), which could lead to what is called Model Collapse. Basically, the output will get worse because AI has already bastardized the input. OpenAI and Google are already starting to consider what comes next, leaving the possibility that these models are as good as it gets. 

And means one thing — the Internet, culture, and the general online experience will remain polluted by this pure, unfiltered, toxic sludge for some time to come.