By Aisha Down
Publication Date: 2025-12-27 17:00:00
In the algorithm-driven economy of 2025, one man’s Shrimp Jesus is another man’s sideline.
AI slop – the low-quality, surreal content that floods social media platforms and is used to generate views – is a phenomenon, some would say Internet phenomenon in 2024 and 2025. Merriam-Webster’s word of the year this year is “slop” and refers exclusively to the Internet variant.
It emerged shortly after the emergence of popular large-scale language models like ChatGPT and Dall-E, which democratized content creation and allowed large swaths of Internet users to create images and videos that resembled – to varying degrees – the creations of professionals.
In 2024, it began to reach cultural peaks. Notable among these was Shrimp Jesus, a viral trend that briefly saw Facebook flooded with AI-generated images of the deity fused with crustaceans. “Shrimp Jesus” was quickly followed by hallmarks of the AI slop genre: videos of old women claiming to be celebrating their birthdays…