AI Slop Is Everywhere. Here's How to Tell If Content Was Written by AI

You could open a streaming platform, scroll through your inbox, or browse a self-published bookstore, and definitely notice the internet is getting sludgier. 

Not long ago, producing an article, a functioning app, or a radio-ready song required years of training and practice, not to mention a fair amount of grit. However, this might no longer be the case with artificial intelligence handing near-professional creative tools to everyone. 

According to the Economist report, monthly e-book releases on Amazon tripled from roughly 100,000 to 300,000 after ChatGPT-3.5 launched in late 2022. On the music platform Deezer, AI-generated tracks now account for 44% of all new uploads, around 75,000 songs per day. 

Meanwhile, self-filed civil lawsuits in the United States doubled between 2023 and 2025, many drafted with chatbot assistance. Academia is feeling the strain too, with preprint servers like arXiv seeing a surge of submissions, even as rejection rates have more than doubled since early 2023. And monthly new releases on Apple's App Store jumped from under 50,000 to over 100,000, fueled by "vibe coding" tools that let non-programmers build software from a text prompt. 

AI slop is taking over YouTube, and the algorithm is doing exactly what it was built to do

YouTube isn’t broken. Its algorithm is simply optimised for engagement, and AI-generated slop is the result.

TechloyDamilare Odedina

The sheer volume of this development is staggering and raises a question for anyone reading or listening. Which is, how do you know whether the words in front of you came from a person or a prompt? 

What to Look For To Detect AI Writing