Send message to Author

Short abstract

This paper frames mass-produced low-quality AI-generated content, known as AI slop, as digital excess, contributing to critical debates on AI’s environmental costs and highlighting how platform capitalism amplifies wasteful forms of digitalisation that intensify ecological harm.

Long abstract

The low-quality, repetitive, and, at times, dubious AI-generated text, images, videos, and music, known as AI slop, is increasingly spreading on online platforms. On YouTube, nearly one in ten of the fastest-growing channels publishes exclusively AI-generated content (Bharadia, 2025). In publishing, Amazon’s response to mass AI-generated submissions has been setting a limit of three self-published Kindle books per author per day (Brodsky, 2024). Spotify removed 75 million spam tracks in 2025 after a surge of AI-generated music (Milmo, 2025), while on platforms such as Pinterest, the flood of AI-generated imagery has led to users questioning whether it remains usable (Rowe, 2025).

This paper conceptualises AI slop as a form of digital excess, amounting to something more than necessary, wasteful, and superfluous (Olsson et al., 2023; Vigren et al., 2026). While debates on AI’s environmental footprint often focus on energy-intensive model training and data centers, this paper shifts attention to the mass generation of AI content, driving greater storage, processing, and distribution demands and increasing energy and water consumption. Crucially, this excess is deeply embedded in the political economy of platform ecosystems. Rather than tackling content overload, major platforms encourage rapid, high-volume production, with algorithmic visibility and monetisation models that reward scale rather than quality, effectively institutionalising digital waste. By framing AI slop as digital excess, the paper contributes to critical debates on AI’s environmental costs and highlights how platform capitalism amplifies wasteful forms of digitalisation that intensify ecological harm.

AI slop; digital excess; generative AI; environmental costs; platform capitalism