You can usually tell within the first two lines. The grammar is clean, the facts look fine and nothing is misspelled, yet the piece feels like nobody actually wrote it. It feels assembled.
That feeling now has a name. It is called AI slop, and this guide covers seven signs that help you spot it in blog posts, product pages, videos and images. You will also get simple checks to run before you trust or share anything.
- What Is AI Slop?
- Sign 1: The Writing Sounds Like a Textbook
- Sign 2: Long, Even Sentences
- Sign 3: Everything Comes in Threes
- Sign 4: No Real Experience Behind It
- Sign 5: Confident, Specific and Wrong Facts
- Sign 6: Images and Audio Have Their Own Tells
- Sign 7: It Wraps Up Too Neatly
- How Can You Protect Yourself From AI Slop?
- What Does Google Say About AI Content?
- Frequently Asked Questions
What Is AI Slop?
In December 2025, Merriam-Webster chose slop as its Word of the Year, and the word now describes low-quality digital content made in bulk with generative AI. Think junky AI-written books, recycled videos and reports that fill a page without saying anything.
Slop is not the same as every AI-assisted piece. A careful writer can use AI for research or structure and still publish something useful. Slop is what you get when nobody checks the work, adds real value or cares who reads it.
Sign 1: The Writing Sounds Like a Textbook
Real writing has bumps. People use fragments, repeat a point for emphasis and drop in half-finished thoughts because that is how speech works. AI text often sands all of that down into smooth, correct, forgettable sentences.
Watch for these patterns:
- Almost no contractions, no fragments and no personality on the page
- Inflated words where a plain one would do, such as "leverage" instead of "use"
- The same few pet words, such as "delve" or "tapestry," repeating across one piece
- A tone so agreeable that it never takes a side
Sign 2: The Sentences Are Long, Even and Under-Punctuated
For a while, "count the em dashes" was the internet's favourite shortcut. It does not hold up, because many careful human writers use dashes and not every AI model overuses them.
A more reliable pattern is rhythm. AI text often keeps going in one long sentence joined by "and" instead of breaking an idea into two or three shorter ones. Skim a paragraph and picture its shape. Human writing looks jagged, with a short sentence, a long one, then a fragment. AI writing often looks like a brick wall, with every row the same height.
- Run-on sentences strung together with "and" instead of a period
- Very little change in sentence length from line to line
- Paragraphs that all share the same size and shape
- Almost no semicolons, parentheses or side comments
Sign 3: Everything Comes in Threes
Once you notice this one, you see it everywhere. AI writing loves groups of exactly three: three adjectives, three examples, three bullet points, almost like a reflex.
- "It is fast, it is reliable and it is affordable" style sentences, repeated again and again
- The "it's not X, it's Y" construction reused across unrelated topics
- Lists padded to three items when two would do
- Tidy, confident explanations that add no new information
None of the first three signs proves anything alone. A real person can write a clean paragraph, and a rule of three is not a crime. What matters is whether the signs stack. One flat paragraph is nothing. A whole article that never varies its rhythm and never sounds like it came from a person with an opinion is a different story.
Sign 4: There Is No Real Experience Behind It
This sign separates harmless AI-assisted writing from real slop. An AI model has never had a bad first day at a new job or burned a batch of cookies while testing a recipe. It works from patterns in other people's writing, so a piece can lack any trace of lived experience.
What is usually missing?
- A specific story, such as what happened when the writer actually tried the method
- Original numbers the writer measured, tested or surveyed
- A real quote from a named person instead of "experts say"
- An opinion the writer is willing to defend
Here is a quick gut check. Does the piece sound like someone who has done the thing they describe, or like a well-informed summary of what doing it might be like? The second one is slop, even when the facts are accurate.
Sign 5: The Facts Are Confident, Specific and Wrong
This sign carries the highest stakes because it can actually hurt you. AI models predict likely words, so when no real answer is available they can produce a plausible one instead, such as a fake study, quote or case. Researchers call this AI hallucination, and it is a known limitation of the technology.
A courtroom example shows the risk. In February 2026, an Omaha attorney argued an appeal before the Nebraska Supreme Court, and 57 of the 63 citations in his brief were defective, with 20 described as outright hallucinations. He later admitted using generative AI and called his lack of candor with the court a serious error of judgment. The court suspended him while disciplinary proceedings continue. It also stressed that duties such as candor and diligence stay the same whether or not AI tools are involved.
The same pattern shows up outside courtrooms:
- Studies or reports cited by name that do not exist when you search for them
- Real experts quoted saying things they never said
- Statistics with suspicious precision and no traceable source
- Scientific-sounding claims that fall apart against a second source
None of this means every unfamiliar fact is fake. It means surprising stats and quotes deserve a thirty-second search before you repeat them.
The Two-Question Test
Take signs 4 and 5 together and you get the real filter. Does the piece contain anything the writer could only know from doing the work? And does every stated fact hold up when you check it? If both answers are no, you are reading a fluent guess, not journalism or expertise.
Sign 6: Images and Audio Have Their Own Tells
AI slop is not only a text problem. The same content mill that makes a hollow blog post often makes the stock-style image beside it or the voice-over on a Shorts video.
Visual tells worth training your eye on:
- Extra or fused fingers, and joints that bend in odd ways
- Text inside the image, such as a sign or book spine, that turns to gibberish up close
- Over-smooth, plastic-looking skin with no real texture
- Shadows and reflections that disagree in the same frame
- Complex objects such as bicycle spokes, fences or keyboards that warp or never resolve
Audio has similar tells. AI voiceovers often run at an even, slightly rushed pace with flatter pitch than a real speaker across a full sentence. Add a creator who never appears on camera and posts huge volumes of near-identical videos, and a pattern emerges.
That pattern is not rare. A late 2025 report from the video-editing company Kapwing found that 104 of the first 500 Shorts shown to a new YouTube account, about 21 percent, were AI slop. It also identified 278 channels posting only AI-generated material, which together collected more than 63 billion views. These are estimates with their own method limits, so treat the numbers as a snapshot instead of a final count.
Sign 7: It Wraps Itself Up Too Neatly
The last tell is about shape. AI writing leans toward tidy structure: a broad, sweeping opener, a few evenly sized points, then a summary that repeats everything you just read. It is the five-paragraph essay by reflex.
- An opener like "In today's fast-changing world" that fits any topic
- A closing "In conclusion" paragraph that repeats the piece's own points
- Sentences that sound meaningful once but say nothing new on a second read
- Content that only references other generic content, with no new information entering the loop
Real writing tends to end messier. A person finishes with a leftover question, a specific caveat or an opinion that does not fully resolve, because that is how thinking works.
How Can You Protect Yourself From AI Slop?
Spotting the seven signs is half the job. Here is what to do once you notice them.
If You Are Reading
- Verify any specific stat, quote, case or study against a second independent source before you repeat it
- Check for a real byline and credentials, not just a publish date
- Look for evidence of first-hand experience with the topic
- Use an AI detection tool only as a second opinion, because these tools still give false positives and false negatives
If You Are Publishing
- Edit and fact-check every AI-assisted draft before it goes live
- Add something a model could not invent, such as original data, a real anecdote or a clear opinion
- Build toward E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)
- Keep a source ready for every specific claim, because someone will eventually ask for it
“Signs your YouTube channel could be demonetized for AI content”
What Does Google Say About AI Content?
Google has not banned AI-assisted content. Its Search Central guidance on generative AI content says AI can help with research and structure, but using it to produce many pages without adding value for users may violate the spam policy on scaled content abuse. The tool is not the problem. Pages made without real value or human checking are.
Content that tends to put a site at risk:
- Large volumes of thin, near-identical pages published to capture search traffic
- Pages that add nothing beyond what already sits in the search results
- Claims that contradict well-established facts
- No human editorial judgment anywhere in the process
Final Thoughts
AI slop became Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year because enough people kept running into it that they needed a word for the feeling. It is not going away, and it will keep getting harder to catch at a glance.
The seven signs still hold up: the flat textbook voice, the even punctuation, the rule of three, the missing experience, the confidently wrong facts, the image and audio glitches and the too-neat ending. None of them convicts a piece alone. Several stacked together in one place is your answer.
The goal was never to avoid AI. It is to avoid slop, and now you know what that looks like up close.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does using AI to write automatically make something slop?
No. The deciding factor is whether a person fact-checked the piece, added real value and shaped it for actual readers, not which tool typed the first draft.
Are AI detection tools accurate enough to rely on?
Not fully. They are a useful second opinion, but they can flag careful human writing and miss lightly edited AI drafts. Treat a score as one data point, not a verdict.
Why do fake AI citations keep appearing in serious documents?
They are formatted exactly like real citations, with plausible titles, real-sounding authors and correct-looking style, so they slip past a quick skim. That is why every specific claim deserves a quick independent check before it gets repeated.