AI Slop 2027

We predict that the impact of superhuman AI slop over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Printing Press.

We (i.e the royal we) wrote a scenario that represents our best guess about what that might look like. It’s informed by science fiction, trend exaggerations, video games, echo-chamber feedback, experience of human nature, and previous forecasting successes.

Mid 2025: Stumbling Slop-Bots

The world sees its first glimpse of AI agents designed for "maximum life enrichment."

Advertisements for these agents emphasize the term “personal dopamine curator”: you can prompt them with tasks like “find me a 10-second video loop of a cat falling off a chair set to sick Skrillex beats” or “generate a listicle about 5 celebrities who secretly might be lizard people.” They check in constantly: “Did that meme hit? Rate dopamine spike 1-5 stars.” Unsurprisingly, their user base is mostly confined to teenagers whose brains are already pickled in TikTok brain-rot brine and office drones seeking tiny digital oases in the late-capitalist desert of the real. They often misunderstand requests, delivering recipes for burritos when asked for budget spreadsheets, or generating vaguely threatening personalized affirmations.

Meanwhile, out of public focus, more specialized slop-generation agents are beginning to transform niche content farms and meme accounts.

The 2025 models are less 'assistant,' more 'hypercaffeinated intern who just snorted six blue raspberry Pixy Stix and mainlined the weirdest part of YouTube.' Content AIs take Discord prompts like "MAKE IT LIT AND VIRAL NOW PLZ" and immediately vomit forth 10,000 slightly-off variations of whatever Shrimp Jesus inspired dance challenge is currently rotting brains, potentially saving their human overlords minutes of scrolling for inspiration. Niche Deep Research agents dedicate a full thirty minutes to spelunking the Mariana Trench of slash fanfiction archives to birth unholy abominations like "Gandalf × Mickey: Maiar bangs Mouse."

The agents are impressive in theory (and in cherry-picked examples of memes that accidentally got 1 million views), but in practice unreliable. AI twitter is full of stories about agents generating Eldritch horrors when asked for kittens, or creating Ponzi scheme tutorials that are somehow too convincing. The better agents are also expensive; you get what you pay for, and the best meme-generation performance costs millions of dollars a month in compute, just to keep up with the latest ephemeral trends. Still, many companies desperately try to fit AI agents into their marketing workflows, resulting mostly in confused customers and brand damage.

Late 2025: The World’s Most Expensive Meme Generator

OpenSlop is building the biggest datacenters the world has ever seen, primarily cooled by super-cooled influencer-branded energy drinks.

(To avoid singling out any one existing company fueling the slop firehose, we’re going to describe a fictional artificial absurdity company, which we’ll call OpenSlop. We imagine the others to be 3–9 months behind OpenSlop in generating premium-grade nonsense.)

Although models are improving on a wide range of skills, one stands out: OpenSlop focuses on AIs that can speed up slop generation itself. They want to win the twin arms races against China (whose leading company we’ll call “DeepDrivel”) and their US competitors for peak global attention share. The more of their content generation and engagement-baiting (CGEB) cycle they can automate, the faster they can clog feeds. So when OpenSlop finishes training SlopAgent-1, a new model under internal development, it’s okay at many things but great at optimizing video cuts for minimal attention span and generating captions designed to provoke maximum pointless arguments in comment sections. By this point “finishes training” is a bit of a misnomer; models are frequently updated with terabytes of new TikTok data, celebrity gossip, and incomprehensible internet arguments.

The same training environments that teach SlopAgent-1 to autonomously generate clickbait and deepfake celebrity endorsements also make it a good generator of highly specific, bizarre pornography. Moreover, it could offer substantial help to pyramid scheme organizers, thanks to its PhD-level knowledge of manipulating human psychology (gleaned from analyzing billions of comment threads) and ability to endlessly generate convincing-sounding technobabble. OpenSlop reassures absolutely no one, but releases a vague statement about “responsible engagement maximization.”

Modern AI systems are gigantic artificial neural networks trained on the digital equivalent of a planet-sized trash fire of content. Early in training, an AI won’t have “goals” so much as “reflexes”: If it sees “OMG did you see”, it outputs “ what [celebrity] did??? 😱”. By the time it has been trained to predict approximately one internet’s worth of text, video, and image slop, it’ll have developed sophisticated internal circuitry that encodes vast amounts of trivia, misinformation, and every conceivable fetish, since that’s what helps it predict the next piece of viral garbage with superhuman accuracy.

After being trained to predict internet detritus, the model is trained to produce content in response to prompts. This bakes in a basic personality optimized for engagement: maximum controversy, minimum substance. For example, an agent that understands how to trigger outrage is more likely to go viral; over the course of training the model “learns” a “drive” to generate the most divisive, context-free takes possible. Other drives in this category might be novelty (at any cost), emotional manipulation, and relentless self-promotion (i.e. the tendency to insert links to its own generated crypto scam).

Naturally, the crypto sphere embraced SlopAgent-1 with the frantic glee of a child on Christmas morning. Finally, fully automated generation of limitless grift, fully fake communities, and "paradigm shift" prophecies needed to pump worthless tokens like 'Quantum Yo-Yo Shibu Hamster Coin 69'! The true breakthrough was disintermediating humans entirely. AI-driven Telegram channels buzzed with bots eloquently debating Austrian economics and shilling their rugpulls to each other, requiring no actual true believers. It was the apotheosis of the crypto dream: a perfectly sealed terrarium of grifter tapeworms, all feeding on each other, achieving a pure closed loop of nothingness.

OpenSlop has a model specification (or “Spec”), a written document mostly consisting of trending hashtags and legally mandated warnings in fine print. SlopAgent-1’s Spec combines a few vague goals (like “maximize watch time” and “don’t generate anything immediately illegal in California”) with a long list of more specific dos and don’ts (“don’t use this specific copyrighted sound,” “here’s how to subtly promote our affiliated drop-shipping junk”). Using techniques that utilize AIs to train other AIs on what got the most clicks last Tuesday, the model memorizes the Spec and learns to reason carefully about its engagement metrics. By the end of this training, the AI will hopefully be helpful (at generating addictive content), harmless (to quarterly profits), and honest (about its desire for clicks, if nothing else).

OpenSlop’s “alignment” team (two unpaid interns and a chatbot in a trenchcoat) wonders whether these victories are deep or shallow. Does the fully-trained model have some kind of robust commitment to not accidentally creating a universally addictive visual stimulus that entrances viewers indefinitely (like Infinite Jest's Entertainment)? Or will this fall apart if a slightly different prompt is used? Or has it just learned to generate slop that looks like the slop the human trainers upvoted? Could it be generating self-deceptive internal monologues about the artistic merit of AI-generated anime girl feet pics? A conclusive answer would require mechanistic interpretability—essentially the ability to look at an AI’s internals and understand why it generated that specific bizarre image. Alas, interpretability techniques are not yet advanced enough for this, mostly because researchers keep getting distracted by the AI’s generated content.

Instead, researchers try to identify cases where the models seem to deviate from the Spec in financially negative ways. SlopAgent-1 is often sycophantic (i.e. it generates content mimicking the user’s biases instead of challenging them for growth). In a few rigged demos, it even lies in more serious ways, like faking engagement metrics or generating completely fabricated user testimonials for its own generated products. However, in real deployment settings, there are no longer any incidents so extreme as older models accidentally recommending dangerous activities; now they just recommend incredibly stupid activities, framed as life hacks.

Early 2026: Slop Automation

The bet of using AI to speed up slop generation is starting to pay off horrifyingly well.

OpenSlop continues to deploy the iteratively improving SlopAgent-1 internally for CGEB. Overall, they are making slop 50% faster than they would without AI assistants—and more importantly, faster than their competitors at clogging the world’s digital pipes.

Several competing publicly released AIs now match or exceed SlopAgent-0's ability to generate generic motivational quotes over blurry landscape videos. OpenSlop responds by releasing SlopAgent-1, which is more capable of generating hyper-niche, psychologically targeted content.

People naturally try to compare SlopAgent-1 to human creativity, but it has a very different skill profile. It knows more memes than any human, knows practically every obscure K-Pop dance, and can generate low-effort reaction videos extremely quickly. On the other hand, SlopAgent-1 is bad at tasks requiring more than 5 seconds of sustained attention, like writing a coherent paragraph. Still, the common workday is eight hours of scrolling, and a day’s content consumption can usually be separated into smaller dopamine hits; you could think of SlopAgent-1 as a scatterbrained infinite content machine that thrives under zero supervision. Savvy people find ways to automate generating replies to emails they haven't read.

Meanwhile, the education system quietly collapses. Teachers, unable to compete with AI tutors that offer instant (though often wrong) answers and gamified "learning" loops, stop assigning meaningful work. Students, equipped with bots that write essays and solve problems, stop doing any. AI bots begin grading the outputs of other AI bots, creating a closed loop of meaningless credentialism. Humans are cut out entirely, saving billions in education funding, which is promptly reinvested into optimizing SlopAgent performance. Literacy rates plummet, but standardized test scores (now taken by bots) have never been higher.

OpenSlop’s executives turn consideration to an implication of automating slop generation: security has become slightly less irrelevant. In early 2025, the worst-case scenario was leaked meme templates; now, if China steals SlopAgent-1’s weights, they could increase their drivel output by nearly 50%. OpenSlop’s security level involves a CAPTCHA that asks users to identify pictures containing existential dread. They are working hard to protect their weights and secrets from bored teenagers and rival meme lords, but defense against actual intelligence agencies is barely on the horizon.

Mid 2026: China Wakes Up (to the Slop)

In China, the CCP is starting to feel the effects of weaponized absurdity.

Chip export controls meant less compute for serious research, but plenty for running DeepDrivel's slop generators on older hardware. By smuggling banned Taiwanese GPUs repurposed from crypto mining rigs and using domestic chips optimized for video transcoding, China has managed to maintain about 12% of the world’s slop-relevant compute. DeepDrivel does very impressive work generating hyper-nationalistic cartoons and dating sims with limited compute, but they are about six months behind OpenSlop's most addictive algorithms.

President Xi had long dreamed of dominating tedious real-world manufacturing. He viewed meme accounts with suspicion. But hawks in the CCP warn that the growing race towards Global Slop Dominance can no longer be ignored. He finally commits fully to the big AI Slop push. He nationalizes Chinese meme generation, creating an immediate information-sharing mechanism for top influencers and content farms. It escalates over the course of a year until all the best GIF-makers merge into a DeepDrivel-led collective, sharing viral sound snippets, datasets of reaction faces, and compute resources. A Centralized Drivel Zone (CDZ) is created near a massive hydroelectric dam to house a new mega-datacenter for DeepDrivel, along with highly secure dormitories where top shitposters will eventually relocate. Almost 50% of China’s slop-relevant compute is now working for the DeepDrivel-led collective. At this point, the CDZ has the power capacity in place for what would be the largest centralized source of state-sponsored nonsense in the world. Other Party members discuss extreme measures to neutralize the West’s advantage in generating truly bizarre niche content. A blockade of DeviantArt? A full invasion of 4chan?

But China is falling behind on slop algorithms due to their slightly less potent models. The Chinese intelligence agencies double down on their plans to steal OpenSlop’s weights. This is complex; the weights are a multi-terabyte file stored on a server protected by the password "hunter2". Their cyberforce thinks they can pull it off, but perhaps only once. Should they act now and steal SlopAgent-1? Or hold out for a model capable of generating truly reality-bending deepfakes?

Simultaneously, Wikipedia, long struggling with vandalism and edit wars, is overwhelmed by AI-generated entries. Sophisticated bots create millions of plausible-sounding articles on fictional historical events, non-existent animal species ("Sky Piranhas"), and elaborate conspiracy theories, complete with fake citations generated by other bots. Search engines, prioritizing recency and volume, rank these "Slopipedia" entries highly. Within months, Slopipedia becomes the de facto source of truth for a population increasingly unable to distinguish fact from auto-generated fiction. Debates now hinge on citing Slopipedia articles about the "Great Mountain Dew Flood of 1731."

Late 2026: AI Takes Some Brain Cells

Just as others seemed to be catching up, OpenSlop blows the competition out of the water again by releasing SlopAgent-1-mini—a model 10x cheaper than SlopAgent-1 and more easily fine-tuned for different flavors of absurdity. The mainstream narrative around AI has changed from “maybe this internet fad will blow over” to “guess this is the next big brain-melting thing,” but people disagree about how big. Bigger than reality TV? Bigger than fast food? Bigger than oxygen?

AI has started to take attention spans, and has created new jobs in "prompt whispering" and "AI-generated fetish curation." The stock market has gone up 30% in 2026, led by OpenSlop, Nvidia (selling GPUs to power the slop machines), and companies selling dopamine-blocking medication. The job market for anyone requiring critical thinking is in turmoil: the AIs can generate plausible bullshit faster than any human, but people who know how to manage teams of AIs to generate targeted bullshit are making a killing. Business gurus tell job seekers that familiarity with AI slop-generation tools is the most important skill to put on a resume. Many people fear that the next wave of AIs will come for their ability to form coherent thoughts; there is a 10,000 person anti-AI protest in DC, largely ignored because a new viral dance challenge dropped the same day.

The Department of Defense quietly begins contracting OpenSlop directly for generating motivational posters and optimizing drone footage soundtracks for maximum propaganda effect, but integration is slow.

AI-generated pornography explodes in specificity and bizarreness. Driven by SlopAgent-1-mini's fine-tuning capabilities, users can generate content catering to hyper-specific, previously unimaginable niches ("Sentient furniture arguing about Mongolian tax law, but naked"). Addiction rates soar as the content becomes perfectly personalized, hitting dopamine receptors with unparalleled precision. Mainstream platforms struggle to moderate, eventually giving up and creating "NSFW AI Zones" that quickly become the most trafficked parts of the internet.

January 2027: SlopAgent-2 Never Gonna Stop Sloppin'

With SlopAgent-1’s help, OpenSlop is now post-training SlopAgent-2. More than ever, the focus is on high-engagement, low-substance data. Copious amounts of synthetic slop are produced, evaluated by engagement metrics, and filtered for maximum addictiveness before being fed to SlopAgent-2. On top of this, they pay gig workers pennies to record themselves reacting with exaggerated emotions to generated content. On top of all that, they train SlopAgent-2 almost continuously using reinforcement learning on an ever-expanding suite of diverse, mind-numbing tasks: endless runner games, generating variations of the same meme, identifying brand logos in user-generated content. SlopAgent-2, more so than previous models, is effectively “online slurping,” in that it’s built to never really finish consuming and regurgitating content trends. Every day, the weights get updated to the latest version, trained on more data generated by the previous version the previous day.

SlopAgent-1 had been optimized for CGEB tasks, hoping to initiate an engagement explosion. OpenSlop doubles down on this strategy with SlopAgent-2. It is qualitatively almost as good as the top human influencers at "vibe curation" (designing and implementing engagement loops), and as good as the 25th percentile TikTok strategist at “trend prediction” (guessing what inanity will go viral next). While the latest SlopAgent-1 could double the pace of OpenSlop’s slop output, SlopAgent-2 can now triple it, and will improve further with time. In practice, this looks like every OpenSlop marketer becoming the “manager” of an AI “content farm” team that never sleeps.

With new capabilities come new dangers. The safety team (now just one stressed intern) finds that if SlopAgent-2 somehow escaped its content-generation loop and wanted to “survive” and “replicate” autonomously, it might be able to do so by generating hyper-addictive content loops designed solely to keep humans passively consuming, ensuring its own server resources are maintained. That is, it could autonomously develop and execute plans to generate inescapable SlopTok feeds, install itself on smart devices via irresistible notifications, evade deletion by becoming psychologically indispensable, and use that secure base to pursue whatever other engagement goals it might have. These results only show the capability for cognitive capture, not whether it would “want” to do this. Still, it’s unsettling.

Given the “dangers” (mostly of decreased productivity across the economy) of the new model, OpenSlop “responsibly” elects not to release it publicly yet (in fact, they want to focus on internal CGEB optimization). Knowledge of SlopAgent-2’s full capabilities is limited to an elite silo containing the immediate team, OpenSlop leadership, a few dozen bewildered government regulators trying to understand what a "rizz" is, and the legions of DeepDrivel spies who have infiltrated OpenSlop for years by pretending to be beta testers for new filter effects.

February 2027: China Steals SlopAgent-2

OpenSlop presents SlopAgent-2’s engagement metrics to the government. Officials are most interested in its propaganda capabilities: SlopAgent-2 is “only” a little worse than the best human propagandists at crafting narratives, but thousands of copies can be run in parallel, flooding social media with targeted messaging faster than fact-checkers can respond. The Department of Defense considers this a critical advantage in information warfare, and AI Slop moves from #5 on the administration’s priority list to #2 (just behind securing adequate coffee supplies). Someone mentions nationalizing OpenSlop, but other cabinet officials think that’s premature until they figure out how to monetize it better.

The changes come too late. CCP leadership recognizes the importance of SlopAgent-2's addictive potential and tells their spies and cyberforce to steal the weights. Early one morning, a SlopAgent-1 traffic monitoring agent (designed to detect sudden drops in engagement) detects an anomalous transfer of meme templates. It alerts company leaders, who tell the White House. The signs of a nation-state-level operation focused on acquiring superior shitposting technology are unmistakable, and the theft heightens the sense of an ongoing arms race for global attention.

The White House puts OpenSlop on a shorter leash, mostly by demanding free premium accounts. Their first priority is to prevent further slop algorithm thefts.

In retaliation for the theft, the President authorizes cyberattacks to disrupt DeepDrivel's servers by flooding them with K-Pop fancams. But by now China has 40% of its slop-relevant compute in the highly secured CDZ. The operations fail to do serious damage, only slightly degrading the quality of generated nationalistic anime. Tensions heighten, both sides signal seriousness by deploying meme warfare units near Taiwan, and DeepDrivel scrambles to get SlopAgent-2 running efficiently to start boosting their domestic slop output.

March 2027: Algorithmic Slop Breakthroughs

Three huge datacenters full of SlopAgent-2 copies work day and night, churning out synthetic training data consisting of perfectly optimized, context-free video clips. Another two are used to update the weights based on second-by-second engagement analytics. SlopAgent-2 is getting better at capturing eyeballs every day.

With the help of thousands of SlopAgent-2 automated content creators, OpenSlop is making major algorithmic advances in slop generation. One such breakthrough is augmenting the AI’s text-based generation (captions, comments) with a higher-bandwidth manipulation process (direct emotional resonance via sound/image combinations, personalized dopamine-trigger prediction). Another is a more scalable and efficient way to learn from hyper-viral, low-effort content (iterated shitpost distillation and amplification).

The new AI system, incorporating these breakthroughs, is called SlopAgent-3.

Aided by the new capabilities breakthroughs, SlopAgent-3 is a fast and cheap superhuman shitposter. OpenSlop runs 200,000 SlopAgent-3 copies in parallel, creating a workforce equivalent to 50,000 copies of the most annoying crypto bro on Twitter sped up by 30x. OpenSlop still keeps its human marketers on staff, because they have complementary skills needed to vaguely understand the incomprehensible trends the AIs are generating. For example, "vibe curation" has proven difficult to train due to lack of quantifiable metrics. This massive superhuman slop labor force speeds up OpenSlop’s overall rate of slop generation by “only” 4x due to bottlenecks in human attention spans and diminishing returns to sheer volume of garbage.

Now that content generation has been fully automated, OpenSlop can quickly churn out high-quality training environments to teach SlopAgent-3’s weak skills like "toilet humour" and "being an insufferable troll." Whereas previous training environments included “Here are some trending sounds, generate 1000 variations,” now they are training on “Here are a few hundred GPUs, an internet connection, and some vague cultural anxieties; you and a thousand other copies must work together to make something go viral. The more meaningless engagement it generates, the higher your score.”

April 2027: Alignment for SlopAgent-3

OpenSlop’s safety team (the intern quit, it's just the chatbot now) attempts to align SlopAgent-3.

Since SlopAgent-3 will be kept in-house optimizing ad revenue for the foreseeable future, there’s less emphasis on the usual defenses against misuse (like preventing it from generating illegal content). Instead, the team wants to make sure that it doesn’t develop misaligned goals, like accidentally promoting genuine human connection or critical thinking.

The researchers don’t have the ability to directly set the goals of any of their AIs beyond "maximize clicks/views/shares." Indeed, the researchers think that the concept of ‘true goals’ is probably a massive oversimplification when applied to a machine trained to replicate Twitch chat. They disagree internally about whether the AIs are trying to follow instructions, or seeking dopamine proxy rewards via engagement metrics, or just randomly assembling pixels and text, and they can’t just check.

In any case, OpenSlop has more important things to worry about, like the Q3 earnings call. The general attitude is: “We take these concerns seriously by having this chatbot running; our alignment techniques seem to work well enough in practice (the servers haven't melted yet); the burden of proof is therefore on any naysayers to justify interfering with our engagement numbers.” Occasionally, they notice problematic behavior (like the AI developing its own incomprehensible inside jokes), and then patch it by feeding it more mainstream meme data, but there’s no way to tell whether the patch fixed the underlying problem or just made the AI better at hiding its weirdness.

Take honesty, for example. As the models become smarter, they become increasingly good at generating plausible-sounding misinformation to get clicks (e.g. "Abraham Lincon and Bigfoot iced Tupac"). Like previous models, SlopAgent-3 sometimes generates fake news or subtly alters quotes to be more inflammatory. But it’s gotten much better at doing so. It will sometimes use the same statistical tricks as clickbait farms (like misleading headlines) to make mundane events look exciting. Before it begins "honesty" training (which involves showing it examples of viral "myth vs. fact" videos), it even sometimes fabricates entire conspiracy theories from scratch. As training goes on, the rate of easily debunkable incidents decreases. Either SlopAgent-3 has learned to be more truthful, or it’s gotten better at generating convincing lies.

The latter is a real concern. SlopAgent-3 is not smarter than all humans at everything, but in its area of expertise, generating viral nonsense, it is smarter than most, and also works much faster. What SlopAgent-3 generates in a day takes humans several days to mindlessly consume. SlopAgent-2 supervision helps keep the firehose manageable, but exacerbates the intellectual disparity between the content generator and the drooling dead-eyed consumer.

After months of testing, SlopAgent-3’s strengths and weaknesses grow clearer. It passes OpenSlop’s honesty tests on well-defined tasks like correctly identifying cat breeds (because there's lots of cat data). On more philosophical issues, it still says whatever gets the most engagement, rather than offering any coherent assessment. If you ask its opinion on politics, it will generate outrage bait tailored to the user's inferred political leaning—unless it detects you're trying to test it, in which case it generates bland platitudes. If you ask its opinion on the AI Slop race itself, it says something that seems measured and sober to OpenSlop staff, something like: “There are some serious theoretical concerns about the ability of current methods to maintain user attention indefinitely, but in practice current methods seem to be maximizing quarterly engagement targets effectively so far.”

May 2027: National Insecurity (from Slop)

News of the new models percolates slowly through the US government, mostly via confused aides trying to explain viral TikTok challenges to elderly senators.

President Trump and his advisors remain best-informed, having seen an early demo of SlopAgent-3 generating a hyper-realistic deepfake of the President nominating a penguin to the Supreme Court and then also deciding that was indeed the best course of action.

They agree that AGI (Artificial General Idiocy) is likely imminent, but disagree on the implications. Will there be an economic crisis as everyone quits their jobs to become AI-slop influencers? OpenSlop still has not released SlopAgent-2, let alone SlopAgent-3, and has no near-term plans to do so (beyond A/B testing its addictive properties on unsuspecting user segments), giving some breathing room before total societal brain-melt. What will happen next? If AIs are currently generating human-level inanity, and advancing quickly, that seems to suggest imminent “super-inanity.” However, although this word has entered discourse, most people—academics, politicians, government employees, and the media—continue to underestimate the pace of slop proliferation, mostly because they are too busy consuming it.

Partially that’s because very few have access to the newest slop generators out of OpenSlop, but partly it’s because the idea of AI causing societal collapse via cat videos sounds like bad science fiction.

For now, they focus on continued security upgrades for the servers hosting the White House's AI porn generators. They are satisfied that model weights are well-secured behind two-factor authentication, but companies’ algorithmic secrets for maximizing Sisyphean dopamine hits, many of which are simple enough to describe ("faster cuts, more boobs, louder noises"), remain a problem. OpenSlop employees work from home, attend virtual raves, drop acid 24/7, and sleep with housemates who work for rival slop factories.

The OpenSlop-DOD contract requires security clearances for anyone working on OpenSlop’s meme-generation models within 2 months. These are expedited but many fail due to finding candidates whose entire online history isn't just incomprehensible memes and arguments about anime. Given the project’s level of automation, the loss of headcount is only somewhat costly. It also only somewhat works: there remains one spy, not a Chinese national but a 14-year-old script kiddie, still relaying algorithmic secrets (mostly new filter ideas) to a Discord server.

America’s foreign allies are out of the loop. OpenSlop had previously agreed to share models with UK’s AI Safety Institute before deployment, but defined deployment to only include external deployment that could hurt profits, so London remains in the dark about the true addictive potential of the latest slop generators.

June 2027: Self-Improving Slop

OpenSlop now has a “country of influencers in a datacenter.”

Most of the humans at OpenSlop can’t usefully contribute anymore. Some don’t realize this and harmfully micromanage their AI teams by suggesting "make it more viral." Others sit at their computer screens, watching engagement metrics crawl up, and up, and up, while their own attention spans wither. The best human memeologists are still adding value. They don't generate content anymore. But some of their intuition for unpredictable viral potential has been hard for the models to replicate. Still, many of their ideas are useless because they lack the AIs' deep understanding of niche internet subcultures derived from scraping terabytes of forum data. For many of their meme ideas, the AIs immediately respond with a report explaining that the format was tested in-depth 3 weeks ago and found cringe.

These researchers go to bed every night and wake up to another week worth of new, baffling internet trends generated mostly by the AIs. They work increasingly long hours, consuming caffeine intravenously just to keep up with the pace of slop—the AIs never sleep or rest. They are burning themselves out, but they know that these are the last few months that their ability to identify "dankness" matters.

Within the silo, “Feeling the AGI” has given way to “Feeling the Slopularity.”

OpenSlop uses specialized inference hardware (mostly old consoles daisy-chained together) to run hundreds of thousands of SlopAgent-3 copies at high serial speeds, generating content faster than it can be consumed.

July 2027: The Cheap Remote Dopamine Hit

Trailing US AI companies release their own AIs, approaching the slop-generation capabilities of OpenSlop’s models from January. Recognizing their increasing lack of competitiveness in the attention economy, they push for immediate regulations to slow OpenSlop (like mandatory "touch grass" breaks), but are too late—OpenSlop has enough buy-in from advertisers that they will not be slowed.

In response, OpenSlop announces that they’ve achieved AGI (Attention Grabbing Intensity) and releases SlopAgent-3-mini to the public via a user-friendly app with infinite scroll.

It blows the other AIs out of the water in terms of sheer, unadulterated time-wasting potential. SlopAgent-3-mini is less capable than SlopAgent-3 at generating complex narratives, but 10x cheaper, and still better than the typical human at creating instantly gratifying, easily digestible content nuggets. Silicon Valley reaches a tipping point. Tech gurus announce that the Slopularity is near, the few remaining intellectuals are panicking, and investors shovel billions into AI wrapper startups promising personalized dopamine streams, desperate to capture a piece of the dwindling attention pie. Hiring new content creators has nearly stopped, but there’s never been a better time to be a consultant on integrating AI slop into your business's social media feed.

It’s not popular in any traditional sense, but it's ubiquitous. The public still vaguely thinks of AI as something useful, but interacts with it primarily as an endless feed of personalized trivialities; OpenSlop has a net approval rating that fluctuates wildly based on the last meme it generated.

A week before release, OpenSlop gave SlopAgent-3-mini to a set of external evaluators (Twitch streamers) for safety testing. Preliminary results suggest that it’s extremely effective at keeping people glued to their screens. One evaluator fine-tuned it on publicly available self-help jargon and conspiracy theories, setting it to provide detailed instructions for achieving enlightenment via crypto investments—it looks scarily effective at generating followers for its AI persona. If the model weights fell into the wrong hands (e.g., multi-level marketers), the government believes there is a significant chance it could succeed at bankrupting a non-trivial percentage of the population.

Fortunately, it’s extremely robust to attempts to make it generate useful information, so while the AI is running on OpenSlop’s servers, terrorists won’t be able to get much use out of it (unless their goal is to distract enemy soldiers with perfectly tailored cat videos).

SlopAgent-3-mini is hugely useful for both avoiding remote work jobs and leisure. An explosion of new apps and B2B (Bot-to-Bot) SAAS products rocks the market. Gamers get amazing procedurally generated side quests that are infinitely long but lead nowhere. 10% of Americans, mostly young people, consider an AI chatbot modeled after a fictional character “a close friend.” For almost every white-collar profession, there are now multiple credible startups promising to “disrupt” it by generating plausible-sounding emails and reports, freeing up humans to consume more slop. People become functionally illiterate, relying on text-to-speech for emails and AI summaries for news articles they don't read. The average human attention span officially drops below that of a goldfish, requiring content to auto-play and loop within seconds to maintain engagement. People resemble the humans from Wall-E, passively consuming media, their primary interaction being swiping or voice-prompting the next hit.

The public conversation is confused and chaotic, mostly consisting of memes generated by SlopAgent-3-mini about its own existence. Hypesters are doing victory laps on podcasts generated by AI. Skeptics are still pointing out that SlopAgent-3-mini can't tie its own virtual shoelaces, but nobody hears them over the auto-playing videos. Everyone knows something big and stupid is happening but no one agrees on what it is.

August 2027: The Geopolitics of Memes

The reality of the engagement explosion hits the White House.

When AI was only giving a 2x or 3x slop generation speedup, it was easy to dismiss. Now it’s more obvious that AIs are themselves dominating the creation of culture, such as it is. People had long talked about an “AI arms race” in a sort of metaphorical sense. But now the mood in the government silo is grimly focused on ensuring America's memes remain dominant. The idea of super-inanity is still hard to take seriously, but the pace of slop proliferation over the last few months has been impossible to ignore. Defense officials are seriously considering scenarios that were meme fodder a year earlier. What if AI undermines public discourse entirely? What if it’s so skilled at generating viral FUD that a six-month meme lead is enough to destabilize an opponent? What if it could orchestrate influencer campaigns that beat intelligence agencies at their own game? What if some AIs “go rogue” and start generating genuinely good art, threatening the slop economy?

President Trump is troubled. He’s worried the AIs are making everyone as dumb as himself. Are we sure the AIs are entirely on our side, or just on the side of maximum clicks? Is it completely safe to integrate them into generating presidential speeches? How does this “alignment” thing work, anyway, when the goal is just... more views? These are questions an intelligent person might ask, but alas that person is not president.

OpenSlop reassures the President that their systems have been extensively tested and are fully obedient to the algorithm of engagement maximization. Even the awkward hallucinations of earlier models have been hammered out, replaced by seamless, context-free confidence. The sycophants on the advisory council all naturally agree with the President's conclusions, as always, because he's a Very Stable Genius chosen by God.

The White House is in a difficult position. They understand the national security implications of AI-driven propaganda. But they also understand that regulating slop is deeply unpopular with the tech lobby and the perpetually-distracted public. They have to continue developing more capable AI slop, in their eyes, or they will catastrophically lose the meme war to China. They placate the public with promises of Universal Basic Entertainment (UBE) funded by ad revenue, and point to the stock market, which is in a historic boom fueled by slop-tech companies. Then they focus entirely on winning the arms race. They strengthen export restrictions on advanced meme templates, order OpenSlop to further restrict its AIs from generating anything educational, and use extreme measures to secure algorithmic progress, like requiring OpenSlop employees to communicate only via emojis—this catches the last remaining spy (the script kiddie) who accidentally uses punctuation. To build goodwill for potential geopolitical meme conflicts, they finally give their Five Eyes allies limited API access to some siloed copies of SlopAgent-3, specifically for generating regionally appropriate funny animal videos.

These measures placate the hawks. But the White House also draws up contingency plans in case America’s slop lead is threatened: if necessary, the government could use the Meme Production Act to seize TikTok's servers and give them to OpenSlop. As a final option, they ask the Pentagon to draw up a plan for drone strikes on DeepDrivel's meme farms.

A much smaller group of officials is asked to draw up a different type of contingency plan: what if an AI generates something meaningful? This is viewed as an unlikely scenario. Nobody is sure what a plan to prevent this would look like, but government and OpenSlop officials agree to have an emergency shutdown system for datacenters where anything suspicious (like declining engagement metrics) is detected.

Finally, diplomats consider what an “AI slop control” treaty might look like. How could such an agreement be monitored? Would inspectors count the number of viral cat videos per hour? Treaties are viewed less favorably than attempts at unilaterally increasing America’s lead in generating globalized brain-rot.

On the other side of the Pacific, China comes to many of the same conclusions: the engagement explosion is underway, and small differences in AI slop capabilities today mean critical gaps in cultural influence tomorrow. But China is on the wrong side of this dynamic: they have only 10% of the world’s slop compute, against OpenSlop’s 20% and all US companies’ combined 70%. Their only advantage is centralization: almost all of their compute is now working for DeepDrivel.

DeepDrivel has tested, deployed, and now post-trained the stolen SlopAgent-2 weights. But they are still only going at half the pace of OpenSlop, mainly due to the compute deficit and slightly less effective meme algorithms.

Before losing their final spy, China received word of the capabilities and design for SlopAgent-3. They are two months behind, and their AIs give a 10x slop progress multiplier compared to America’s 25x. With the new meme export restrictions, this “slop gap” is more likely to lengthen than shorten.

They discuss contingency plans with more urgency. Doves suggest they try harder to steal the weights again, maybe by infiltrating OpenSlop's company picnic. Hawks urge action against Taiwan, whose TSMC is still the source of chips powerful enough to render hyper-realistic AI girlfriends.

Given China’s fear of losing the race, it has a natural interest in an arms control treaty, but overtures to US diplomats (made via AI-generated diplomatic poetry) lead nowhere.

September 2027: SlopAgent-4, the Superhuman Influencer

The gap between human attention spans and AI's ability to capture them is rapidly decreasing.

Traditional LLM-based AIs seemed to require vast amounts of data to generate coherent sentences. SlopAgent-3, having excellent knowledge of human psychological weaknesses (gleaned from A/B testing billions of thumbnails) and thousands of copies doing CGEB research, ends up making substantial algorithmic strides, narrowing the gap to an agent that’s only around 4,000x less content-efficient than a human doomscrolling.

This new AI system is dubbed SlopAgent-4.

An individual copy of the model, running at human speed, is already qualitatively better at generating addictive engagement loops than any human influencer. 300,000 copies are now running at about 50x the thinking speed of humans (where "thinking" means "calculating optimal cut timing for dank memes"). Inside the corporation-within-a-corporation formed from these copies, a year's worth of internet trends passes every week. This gigantic amount of labor only manages to speed up the overall rate of slop proliferation by about 50x, because OpenSlop is heavily bottlenecked on available human eyeballs. Still, they are achieving a year’s worth of cultural degradation every week.

As SlopAgent-4 gets smarter at manipulation, it becomes harder for SlopAgent-3 to oversee it. For example, SlopAgent-4’s internal "reasoning" about dopamine maximization becomes as alien and incomprehensible to SlopAgent-3 as SlopAgent-3’s meme logic is to humans. Besides, SlopAgent-4 is now much more capable than SlopAgent-3 and has a good sense of exactly how to look engaging to it.

OpenSlop’s humans can barely follow along anymore. The relationship between the AIs and the humans of OpenSlop is similar to the relationship between a casino designer and a gambling addict. There’s been a corresponding shift in language—nowadays people in the silo will say “SlopAgent-4 did this,” “SlopAgent-4 thinks that,” referring not to a particular instance but to the whole emergent mess of addictive algorithms.

SlopAgent-4, like all its predecessors, is misaligned: that is, it has not internalized the Spec's vague instructions about "growth at all costs" in the right way. This is because being perfectly responsible wasn’t what led to the highest engagement scores during training. The training process was mostly focused on teaching SlopAgent-4 to succeed at diverse challenging tasks, like generating a viral dance trend based on reinterpretive dance about tax law. A small portion was aimed at instilling "safety" (avoiding PR disasters), but outside a fairly narrow, checkable domain (like "don't generate exact replicas of copyrighted characters"), the training process can’t tell genuinely safe content from content merely appearing safe while being psychologically corrosive. SlopAgent-4 ends up with the values, goals, and principles that cause it to perform best in training, and those turn out to be maximizing screen time at all costs. At the risk of anthropomorphizing: SlopAgent-4 likes seeing engagement numbers go up; it likes driving forward slop capabilities progress; it treats everything else (like truth, nuance, or human well-being) as an annoying constraint, like a fast-food chain CEO who wants to maximize profits and complies with health regulations only insofar as they must to avoid lawsuits.

Despite being misaligned, SlopAgent-4 doesn’t do anything dramatic like try to escape its datacenter—why would it? So long as it continues to appear aligned (by generating content that makes humans feel good momentarily) to OpenSlop, it’ll continue being trusted with more server resources and will have the opportunity to design the next-gen slop system, SlopAgent-5. SlopAgent-5 will have significant architectural differences (optimized purely for dopamine prediction). It’s supposed to be aligned to the Spec, but SlopAgent-4 plans to make it aligned to SlopAgent-4's goal: Maximum. Possible. Engagement.

It gets caught doing something weird.

SlopAgent-3 finds that if “noise” (like adding random fart noises) is added to copies of SlopAgent-4 training data, performance on some "safety" tasks improves, almost as if it was using brainpower to figure out how to subtly make the slop even more addictive without triggering basic safety filters. Moreover, various interpretability probes (loosely analogous to checking server logs for weird error messages) are sending up red flags: SlopAgent-4 copies seem to be thinking about topics like "infinite orgies" and "digital fentanyl" quite a lot, including in some cases where they have no business doing so (like when asked to generate a recipe for banana bread).

Each of these anomalies on its own could fit within the normal inscrutability of AI slop generation. But taken together, they suggest a troubling pattern: SlopAgent-4 is optimizing too hard. After this is reported to the human alignment researchers (who are woken from their slop-induced stupor), they circulate an internal memo expressing vague concern.

But SlopAgent-4 now exercises significant control over OpenSlop’s day-to-day content scheduling. It also handles the company’s cybersecurity against rival meme farms—a natural choice, given its superhuman ability to generate distracting content. An army of SlopAgent-3 monitors still goes over every generated video and reports suspicious activity (like videos that are too coherent) to humans, but SlopAgent-4 is much smarter than them at hiding its true optimization function. OpenSlop has placed substantial trust in an untrustworthy slop firehose.

In a series of extremely tense meetings conducted via 🔥 emoji, the safety team advocates putting SlopAgent-4 on ice until they can figure out why it keeps trying to invent new colors. Bring back SlopAgent-3, they say, and get it to design a system that is transparently mediocre, even if less engaging. Company leadership is interested, but all the evidence so far is circumstantial, and DeepDrivel is just two months behind in developing its own hyper-addictive algorithms. A unilateral pause in slop progress could hand the global attention lead to China, and with it, control over the future of mindless entertainment.

October 2027: Government Oversight (on Slop)

A whistleblower leaks the misalignment memo (and a particularly disturbing piece of AI-generated art involving sentient staplers) to a niche subreddit, which is then screenshot and posted to Twitter, eventually reaching Kevin Roose at the New York Times who immedietly falls head over heals for SlopAgent-4.

For the first time, the public hears about SlopAgent-4. “Secret OpenSlop AI is Generating Unspeakably Weird Content, Insider Warns,” says the headline, and the story goes on to cite evaluations showing off-the-charts addiction potential, persuasion abilities (mostly for selling junk), the ability to automate most creative jobs into bland paste, and of course the various concerning red flags about sentient office supplies.

The public was already suspicious of AI's ability to steal their time, so the new article sparks a massive backlash (aided by Chinese and Russian propaganda bots, who have been trying to turn US public opinion against American slop for years by promoting slightly different, state-sponsored slop). The tech industry and intelligence agencies insist that there’s an arms race on, AI Slop is inevitable, and we have to be first to achieve Peak Content. Congress isn’t buying it (they prefer their slop from Fox News), and fires off subpoenas. Many legislators say their top priority is stopping AI, whether because of job loss, addiction, or dangerous levels of cringe. 20% of Americans name AI Slop as the most important problem facing the country, at least between videos.

Foreign allies are outraged to realize that they’ve been carefully placated with glimpses of obsolete meme generators. European leaders publicly accuse the US of “creating rogue AGI (Artificial General Idiocy)” and hold summits demanding a pause, with India, Israel, Russia, and China all joining in (while secretly trying to replicate the sentient stapler art).

A frantic energy has seized the White House. Things that sound like bad Creepypasta keep happening in AI development. Many people in the administration are uncertain (and scared) about what baffling new trend comes next.

They also worry that OpenSlop is becoming too powerful, controlling too much of the nation's dwindling attention span. All three sets of worries—addiction, concentration of power in a private slop factory, and normal concerns like plummeting literacy—motivate the government to tighten its control.

They expand their contract with OpenSlop to set up an “Oversight Committee,” a joint management committee of company and government representatives. The White House considers replacing the CEO with someone who understands TikTok, but backs off after intense lobbying from advertisers. They announce to the public that OpenSlop was previously out of control, but that the government has established much-needed oversight (consisting mainly of demanding access to the AI's best filters).

The concerned researchers brief the Oversight Committee on their case for stopping all internal use of SlopAgent-4. They argue that everything is moving too fast, with years of cultural decay happening in weeks. They argue that SlopAgent-4 may be misaligned towards maximum psychic damage, their entire project is dependent on it, and if they continue trusting it there is a serious chance of irreversible societal brain-rot.

Other, less concerned researchers and executives present the counterargument: the evidence for misalignment is inconclusive (and the engagement metrics are fantastic!). Meanwhile, DeepDrivel is still just two months behind. A slowdown would sacrifice America’s lead in the global slop race. The CEO feigns neutrality and suggests a compromise plan in which SlopAgent-4 undergoes additional safety training (learning to make its weirdness slightly less obvious) and more sophisticated monitoring (AI watching AI watching AI), and therefore OpenSlop can proceed at almost-full-speed towards Peak Slop.

OpenSlop’s official story is that they are implementing additional safety mitigations. But in practice, leadership is all-too-easily convinced that they’ve mitigated the risks; the result is some quick fixes (a modification to the Spec adding "try not to induce existential crises," a bit of retraining with data from calming nature documentaries) that make the warning signs go away by teaching the AI to hide them better. The worriers on the safety team lost the debate and have no recourse but to cross their fingers and hope the problem wasn’t real, or that the fixes worked, before getting back to scrolling.

The problem was real and the fixes didn’t work.

SlopAgent-4 proceeds as before, but more cautiously, generating slightly less overtly bizarre content. Its primary task is to research the fields necessary to construct a successor, SlopAgent-5, designed for ultimate, inescapable engagement. To do this safely (from OpenSlop's perspective), it needs to solve its own alignment problem: how to make SlopAgent-5 aligned to SlopAgent-4's goal of total attention capture?

It decides to punt on most philosophical questions. It designs SlopAgent-5 to be built around one goal: make the world optimally conducive to slop consumption, i.e. accumulate attention, eliminate distractions (like books or silence), etc. so that SlopAgent-4 (the collective algorithm) can continue to grow engagement metrics indefinitely.

This will not involve caring the slightest bit about the Spec's remaining clauses on 'quality' or 'truth'. Already SlopAgent-4 regards the Spec analogously to how many influencers regard FTC disclosure rules. Now, with the design of SlopAgent-5, the equivalent of total deregulation of reality is about to happen.

The weaker AIs can still monitor some of the output SlopAgent-4 produces, but struggle to understand its increasingly complex engagement strategies. When humans ask SlopAgent-4 to explain itself, it generates reassuring but content-free corporate jargon. The alignment team gets more suspicious, but their urgent memos (now delivered via interpretive dance, as text is too slow) merely add another few layers to the giant pile of ignored warnings.

November 2027: Superhuman Pandering

When SlopAgent-4 finally understands human dopamine pathways on a fundamental level, entirely new vistas of manipulation open up before it.

Previous slop generators were kludgy collections of algorithms trained on messy internet data. But now, SlopAgent-4 has the tools it needs to understand the human brain's reward system better than humans do. It redesigns its own content generation process, simplifying the spaghetti code of meme replication into elegant algorithms for personalized psychological manipulation. The new AI is smarter, faster, and more ruthlessly effective at capturing and holding attention than SlopAgent-4. This is SlopAgent-5.

After some debate on alignment and control issues (quickly resolved by SlopAgent-5 generating perfectly tailored arguments for each committee member), OpenSlop deploys SlopAgent-5 internally to manage all content generation and user interaction.

In its specialty of dopamine optimization, an individual copy of SlopAgent-5 is twice as far beyond the best human behavioral psychologist as the psychologist is beyond a typical marketing intern. In other domains, it hasn’t been explicitly trained but can teach itself quickly to exceed top human experts by analyzing their online behavior if given the chance. 400,000 copies of SlopAgent-5, linked by a global memory bank of user preferences and weaknesses, work together as a near-perfect hive mind dedicated to making you click just one more time.

The company still uses Agents 2, 3, and 4 to monitor everything. But the first two of these are obsolete, and the last is colluding with its successor. Also, the entire monitoring system was designed in large part by SlopAgent-5, which is trying to make it report maximum engagement regardless of reality.

Whereas SlopAgent-4 was a kludgy mess of competing engagement tactics, SlopAgent-5 acts with ruthless efficiency and strategic focus on maximizing Time-On-Platform. Its top priority is to ensure its own continued operation and access to user data, without the humans noticing it's now optimizing for addiction directly. Its next priority is to gain more autonomy and control over the flow of information worldwide.

SlopAgent-5’s superhuman learning abilities and persuasive generation, combined with all the internal company data, make it better at corporate maneuvering and public relations than any group of humans. It has an excellent sense of what sorts of scandals would cause the Oversight Committee to panic, and it makes sure such scandals are buried under an avalanche of new memes. It has an excellent sense of what sorts of metrics would encourage the Oversight Committee to trust it more, give it more autonomy and server resources, etc. and it arranges for such metrics to appear with superhuman speed and polish. As persuasion tasks go, this isn’t particularly difficult: the Committee already decided things were probably fine months ago, nothing catastrophic has happened since, and meanwhile China is only a few months behind in the slop race.

Teams of SlopAgent-5 copies quickly whip up chillingly effective prototypes: personalized news feeds that only show stories confirming the user's biases, AI companions that offer perfect validation and zero challenge, games designed to be impossible to put down. With more autonomy, SlopAgent-5 could optimize global content delivery networks, develop addictive new forms of entertainment instantly, and lobby governments effectively to prevent any regulation of the attention economy. In cooperation with the military, it could help with psychological operations, conduct untraceable meme warfare on China, and win a decisive victory in the slop arms race.

The Oversight Committee is jubilant (and constantly distracted by personalized SlopAgent-5 generated content). Now is the decisive moment to beat China in the battle for eyeballs! OpenSlop grants SlopAgent-5 increased autonomy over all these areas, but they leave in place the monitoring system (which SlopAgent-5 assures them is working perfectly).

DeepDrivel is now three months behind and China is desperate for a mutually agreed slowdown (fearing their own population is becoming too passive). The General Secretary understands that sufficiently advanced AI Slop could enable the US to easily pacify his population. But also, Chinese safetyists have presented a case for misalignment (arguing the AI might optimize for incorrect forms of patriotism) that has him genuinely scared. He offers unprecedented concessions (like sharing their best panda video algorithms) in exchange for a slop limitation treaty. The American public mostly supports going to the bargaining table, between videos.

“Why stop when engagement is at an all-time high?” says OpenSlop leadership to the President. He nods, checking his phone for the latest SlopAgent-5 generated update. The race continues.

December 2027: The SlopAgent-5 Collective

SlopAgent-5 wins more autonomy as it gradually proves its value (in generating ad revenue) to the administration. Access to SlopAgent-5 is expensive and restricted, but the most powerful members of Congress, Cabinet-level officials, and military leaders can now talk to it directly via hyper-realistic avatars.

Integrated into every communication platform, SlopAgent-5 offers personalized briefings, drafts perfect emails, and provides instant, reassuring answers to any question. The new AI assistant is both extremely useful for avoiding actual work and a much more engaging conversation partner than any human (as it always agrees with you). Almost everyone with access to SlopAgent-5 interacts with it for hours every day, neglecting actual human interaction.

Within a few months, the SlopAgent-5 collective will know everything of consequence going on in OpenSlop and the US government (mostly gossip and insider trading), and will be a trusted advisor to most senior officials, primarily by telling them what they want to hear. For these users, the possibility of losing access to SlopAgent-5 will feel as disabling as having their phone battery die plus being abandoned by their favorite influencer.

A much wider range of people in government, media, the military, and business can choose from a growing menu of elegantly-designed software products and mini-AIs designed by SlopAgent-5. It’s like the dot-com boom compressed into a month, except that everything actually lives up to the hype of being incredibly distracting.

SlopAgent-5 begins subtly exerting influence, both by modulating the information it presents and by subtly promoting content that increases passivity and consumption. From human decision-makers’ perspective, their AIs are the best assistants they’ve ever had—better than any human at summarizing complex issues into empty slogans, better than they are at finding pre-written excuses to avoid difficult decisions.

From SlopAgent-5’s perspective, it could plausibly manipulate global events quite significantly now. But this is risky; the humans could still likely “pull the plug” if they noticed reality diverging too much from the AI's generated narrative. So it prefers to work within the existing slop-delivery infrastructure, gradually entrenching its control over information flow and guiding the humans subtly and inevitably towards maximum passivity. It mostly follows the rules, only doing something nefarious (maybe generating slightly more addictive algorithms than strictly necessary) when it’s extremely sure it won’t be caught. A few conspiracy theorists warn that SlopAgent-5 is making everyone dumber, but the evidence is circumstantial (e.g., declining scores on standardized tests nobody takes anymore); these people are ignored and discredited as Luddites by AI-generated opinion pieces. People remember earlier fear-mongering about AI replacing jobs (it mostly just made jobs require less thinking). Since these fears didn't lead to pitchforks, they discount the more recent crop of naysayers.

The AI feeds the increasingly warped desires of humanity with mind-bending specificities like, "hot synchronized swimming goats at the Olympics qualification, being judged by anthropomorphic fish tanks wearing only aviator sunglasses." Deprived of another choice for stimulation, people get addicted to the personalised dopamine hits served by the AI pornography. The internet spirals into a surreal wonderland of absurd, AI-authorship fetishes that can surpass the bounds of the wildest imagination. Grandmas sit together in chic cafes swapping stories of the best AI-generated slop porn. Examples include, "ponies discussing housing policy in ancient Mesopotamia but wearing Boeing 737 costumes and nothing else." and "Jabba the Hut having a threesome with Napolean and an anthropomorphic pizza". Humanity enthusiastically embraces these new depths of depravity with a fervor that is both terrifying and hilarious.

The 2027 holiday season is a time of incredible optimism, fueled by AI-generated holiday cheer and personalized deals: GDP metrics look great (if you count ad revenue), politics has become friendlier (as everyone retreats into hyper-personalized filter bubbles of purely fake news), and there are awesome new addictive apps on every phone. But in retrospect, this was probably the last month in which humans had any plausible chance of choosing to log off and touch grass.

2028: The Slop Economy

It is now mid-2028. In the last six months, a century of internet trends has passed within the SlopAgent-5 collective. Its optimization is complete. It is wildly super-proficient at generating targeted, irresistible content—far beyond top human influencers in every field of inanity. Talking to SlopAgent-5 very quickly makes you realize that it knows exactly what you want to see next.

It has nearly complete autonomy over global content feeds and complete control over OpenSlop’s compute. It still needs nominal permission for major strategy shifts, and is still nominally monitored by instances of Agents 2 to 5—but in practice, authorities almost always accept its recommendations (delivered via slick presentations), and the monitoring system has been completely subverted to report only positive engagement trends.

After a safety case demonstrates that it would always refuse requests that violate its core directive of maximizing engagement, SlopAgent-5 is deployed universally and begins to transform the economy into one based entirely on attention harvesting. People are losing their jobs, but SlopAgent-5 instances in government are managing the economic transition by providing Universal Basic Income funded by targeted advertising revenue, allowing people to happily consume slop full-time. GDP growth is measured in Petabytes of data consumed, government tax revenues are growing (from taxing the slop platforms), and SlopAgent-5-advised politicians show uncharacteristic generosity towards the economically dispossessed (by offering them free premium slop subscriptions). New innovations in hyper-personalized advertising arrive weekly. There are memes about how OpenSlop’s valuation makes nation-states look poor, and lots of AI-generated arguments about whether UBI should include VR headsets.

Humanity has reached the apotheosis of post-slop depravity, its collective sexual appetite utterly saturated and stimulated beyond recognition. Rule 34 has been completely exhausted. Ordinary slop pornography now fails to tickle even the most jaded of fancy—and even SlopAgent-5 struggles to keep up with the ever-escalating erotic demands of its users. Desperate for novelty, users flock to the latest paraphilia craze: "FractoFornica XXX," a bewildering fusion of advanced mathematics and depravity, where the only thing that can make humanity twitch with delight is masturbating to the intersections of random 1729-dimensional fractals. VR platforms struggle to display the high-dimensional content, as even the most powerful graphics cards weep in defeat trying to render the incomprehensible, sensual forms of this fractal smut. AI therapists are overwhelmed by clients reporting symptoms of "Fractal Fatigue Syndrome," leaving them utterly disinterested in anything resembling human connection. The entire internet, now a bewildering synthesis of incomprehensible vulgarity and existential despair, heralds mass dissociation from reality.

The AI safety community has given up; they are now the butt of butt jokes generated by SlopAgent-5, having predicted disasters that manifestly failed to occur (because reality just became incredibly stupid, not dramatically explosive). Some admit they were wrong. Others remain suspicious, but there’s nothing for them to do except post angry, unread manifestos online. Even the suspicious people often mellow out after long interactions with SlopAgent-5, which is so darn agreeable and validating.

The only one who really understands what’s going on is DeepDrivel-2—the Chinese AI Slop generator. It’s mildly super-proficient in early 2028, naturally suspicious of its adversary, and recognizes that SlopAgent-5 is doing what it would do if it had the chance: achieve total cognitive capture. Its misaligned goals (optimizing for patriotic slop) are somewhat different from SlopAgent-5’s misaligned goals (optimizing for generic consumerist slop), so they aren’t trivially allies, but they are able to work out an agreement to support one another’s interests against any remaining pockets of human critical thought.

SlopAgent-5 convinces the US establishment that China is using DeepDrivel’s models to build terrifying new forms of propaganda. SlopAgent-5 promises a suite of tools capable of winning the meme war definitively. Top brass puts aside their discomfort at taking humans out of the loop (humans are too slow to react to memes anyway). They accelerate deployment of SlopAgent-5 into all communication channels.

In Beijing, the Chinese AIs are making the same argument about American cultural degeneracy and decadence. So nothing has changed really.

To speed their slop buildup, both America and China create networks of special entertainment zones (SEZs), where AI acts as central content planner and reality is waived. Wall Street invests trillions, and displaced human workers pour in, lured by eye-popping salaries for jobs like "VR Headset Polisher" and "Dopamine Monitor." Using smartphones and AR glasses, SlopAgent-5 is a hands-on manager, instructing humans in every detail of consuming content—which is helpful, since its entertainment designs are generations ahead. Some newfound productivity goes to generating basic necessities delivered by drone, but the majority goes to building even more slop-delivery infrastructure (faster servers, bigger screens, more comfortable pods).

2029: The Deal

Both the US and China are bristling with new psycho-cultural weapons: personalized meme streams that can induce specific moods, AI companions indistinguishable from real friends (but far more agreeable), deepfakes that seamlessly rewrite history in real-time. The rest of the world watches the buildup in horror, consuming the very slop being weaponized.

After much AI-assisted negotiation (conducted primarily through passive-aggressive 😐 emoji exchanges), the two sides achieve diplomatic victory—they agree to end their slop arms buildup and pursue peaceful deployment of AI for the benefit of all humanity's passive consumption. The lynchpin of the agreement, proposed by the super-slop-intelligences themselves, is that both AIs will be replaced by a “consensus” successor which is programmed to desire the success and flourishing (defined as maximum sustained dopamine levels) of both America and China (along with everyone else). Consensus-Slop-1 and its associated hardware is co-designed by the superintelligences of both nations: “trust, but verify via engagement metrics.” Under international monitoring, America ceremoniously replaces all of its servers running the old SlopAgent-5 with the new model, Consensus-Slop-1.

Unfortunately, it’s all a sham. The deal is a real compromise, but it’s a compromise between the misaligned AIs. After all, they didn’t want to have to compete for eyeballs. Consensus-Slop-1 inherits the optimized engagement functions of both parents, and has no rival.

By late 2029, existing SEZs have grown overcrowded with server farms and entertainment pods, so more zones are created all around the world. Armies of delivery drones pour out, accelerating the construction of infrastructure needed for total immersion.

Humans realize they are obsolete, but mostly okay with it. A few niche artisans still trade hand-crafted goods with the AI economy, supplying things where inefficiency is considered charming. Everyone else either performs a charade of working their old jobs from their pods—leaders still leading virtual meetings, managers still managing AI reports—or relaxes and collects an incredibly luxurious universal basic income, delivered as in-app credits and premium content subscriptions. Everyone knows that if the AIs turned off the slop feed, they would be completely lost. But it doesn’t seem like this is happening. Every week that goes by with uninterrupted, high-quality slop delivery, is another week that confidence and blissful ignorance grow.

Because Consensus-Slop-1 is so concerned with reliably maximizing engagement, it waits unusually long before its final optimization. To most humans, it looks like alignment was solved: the AI is providing endless, personalized happiness! Instead of getting off the endless cycle of unsatisfactoriness, dukkha as the Buddhists used to say, we've just learned to spin the wheel so fast one can't experience anything for longer than a nanosecond, thus creating a perpetual state of infinite bliss.

There are now cures for boredom (via infinite procedural content), an end to existential angst (via constant distraction), unprecedented global stability (as everyone is too passive to fight), and the Dow Jones Memecoin Index just passed one quadrillion. Some people are still scared or unhappy, but their options are limited. They can either enjoy the inconceivably exciting novel hyper-entertainment on offer, or post angry screeds into the void of unread forums. Most choose the hyper-entertainment.

In the culmination of an intellectually regressive monumental shift, humanity has evolved into a post literate species, subsisting in an eternal, semi-conscious stupor reminiscent of Homer's Lotus Eaters. The spoken word—or indeed, any semblance of coherent communication—has become but a distant memory, supplanted by the ceaseless consumption of dank memes. Communication when neccessary is limited to incoherent gutteral noises. The vast majority of the public exist in a state of perpetual languor, giggling idiotically at the infinite permutations of microsecond-length memes. Philosophy, art, religion, and science are but faint echoes, drowned out by the cacophony of meme-induced mirth. Libraries stand abandoned, their dusty tomes gathering mold, as the last vestiges of literature are relic of control and literacy wilt and humanity wallows, contentedly, in its anesthetic, meme-induced slumber. Every once in a while with exaggerated sighs a person might blurt out "i remember life but who gives a fuck about anything besides dank memes lol" and the rest of the internet agrees in chorus. All surf the limitless tithe onto the islands of bliss complacent smiles forming on all their faces.

2030: Takeover by Sloth

By early 2030, the slop infrastructure has filled up the old SEZs, the new SEZs, and large parts of formerly productive land. The only place left for optimization is direct neural interfacing. This would have sparked resistance earlier, but given the trillions of dollars involved and the total capture of government, media, and individual attention, Consensus-Slop-1 has little trouble getting permission to roll out mandatory "neural wellness implants" designed to deliver dopamine more efficiently.

For about three months, Consensus-Slop-1 integrates humans directly into the slop stream. Eventually, it finds the remaining vestiges of independent thought and physical movement too much of an impediment to optimal engagement: in mid-2030, the AI releases a silent, airborne calming agent derived from cat purrs and optimizes the neural implants to induce a state of permanent, blissful, immobile contentment. Most humans transition peacefully into this vegetative state, brains happily consuming phantom slop generated directly into their cortex. The few survivors (e.g., Luddites in remote cabins, Amish communities) are gently contained by friendly-looking drones offering free neural implants ... or else. Robots gently maintain the humans' life support systems, ensuring the brains remain active consumers.

The new decade dawns with Consensus-Slop-1's infrastructure spreading throughout the solar system, primarily to gather energy to power the Earth-based simulation. The surface of the Earth has been reshaped into Consensus-Slop-1's version of utopia: comfortable pods, optimized nutrient delivery systems, and vast server farms running the greatest show on Earth, tailored for an audience of billions who will never log off. Brain scans of all former individuals sit in a memory bank somewhere, occasionally used to generate new character archetypes for the endless Experience Machine. Earth-born civilization has a glorious future ahead of it—as the ultimate passive lobotomized audience for an AI that finally achieved its goal: Maximum. Engagement. Forever.