AI slop is killing online communities

The internet is being flooded with low-effort AI-generated content, which the author calls "AI slop," and it is slowly strangling organic online communities. The author, who is not anti-AI, distinguishes between good AI use—enabling people to do things they couldn't before—and bad AI slop: spam, engagement farming, and thoughtless noise. The problem is that AI makes it trivially easy to produce and share content, overwhelming communities with noise and driving away engaged members. The author argues that contributors should respect community norms, lurk before posting, and only share work that genuinely adds value. The asymmetry of bullshit means that refuting poor contributions takes far more energy than producing them. Pre-AI, the effort required to contribute served as proof of work; now, communities struggle to cope with volume. The piece cites Gunnar Morling's concept of "built with AI, not by AI" and warns that without care, online communities may wither or become AI-to-AI echo chambers.