“Devoid of Sense”: The “Best” of Insane Facebook AI Slop

by Mark Yarm

If you’ve had the misfortune of logging onto Facebook anytime over the last few months, you’ve probably noticed that your parents’ favorite social media platform is overrun with what’s widely known as “AI slop,” a term whose origins are unknown. The most infamous of these garbagey AI-generated images depict various forms of Shrimp Jesus: familiarly long-haired, Westernized images of the Son of God, His body horribly melded with those of various crustaceans.

The AI Slop aesthetic, writes Katie Notopoulos in Business Insider, tends to “involve old people holding a birthday cake asking you to wish them a happy birthday; babies doing things babies shouldn’t do; snakes eating buses, bikes, or other vehicles overloaded with hundreds of babies or some other cargo; soldiers with prosthetic legs; women with missing limbs and huge busts; and Jesus.” These grotesqueries are often accompanied by nonsense captions like “Scarlett Johansson💋💋.”

Alas, Boomers are slurping this slop up, commenting “Amen” en masse on the Jesus images and wishing AI-generated characters a happy birthday. Many appear not to realize that the content they’re engaging with is generated by Midjourney and other AI image generators. As for the reason behind the torrent of terrible images? It’s all pretty scammy, naturally. “Apparent motivations include driving people to off-platform websites, selling products, and building bigger followings,” wrote researchers from Stanford and Georgetown in a recent analysis.

Théodore Cazals, a 19-year-old French university student, runs Insane Facebook AI Slop, a popular novelty Twitter account dedicated to this particularly 2024 “art form.” “We all know someone who doesn’t really know how the internet works,” he says. “This is what our parents, our grandparents, like on Facebook these days.” We recently gave Cazals a call to discuss his Top 5 picks for the “best” Facebook AI slop. He was happy to ladle it out.