AI Slop Is Destroying the Internet. These Are the People Fighting to Save It
AI Slop Is Destroying the Internet. These Are the People Fighting to Save It
Publish Date: 2026-02-18 08:01:00
Source Domain: www.cnet.com
Rosanna Pansino has been sharing her baking creations with the internet for over 15 years, hoping to delight and inspire with fun creations that include a Star Wars Death Star cake and holographic chocolate bars. But in her latest series, she has a new goal: “Kick AI’s butt.”
Blame it on the AI slop overwhelming her social media feeds. Pansino used to see posts from real bakers and friends; now, they’re being crowded out by AI-generated clips. There’s a whole genre of slop videos that feature food, including a bizarre trend of unlikely objects being spread “satisfyingly” on toast.
She decided to do something about it. She would put her years of skill side-by-side with AI to recreate these slop videos in real life.
For instance: a pile of sour gummy Peach Rings, effortlessly smeared on toast. The AI video looked simple enough, but Pansino needed to create something entirely new. She used butter as her base, infused with peach-flavored oil. Yellow and orange food coloring gave it the right pastel hues. She carefully piped the butter into rings using a silicone mold. After they hardened in the freezer, she used uncolored butter to glue two rings together in the right 3D shape. The final touch was to dunk them in a mixture of sugar and citric acid for that sour candy look and taste.
It worked. The butter rings were perfect replicas of real candy rings, and Pansino’s video paralleled the AI version exactly, with the rings smoothly gliding across the toast. Most importantly, she had done what she set out to do.
“The internet is flooded with AI slop, and I wanted to find a way to fight back against it in a fun way,” Pansino tells me.
It’s a rare victory for humans as AI-generated slop inundates an online world that had, once upon a time, been built by humans for humans.
AI technology has been working behind the scenes on the internet for years, often in unnoticeable ways. Then, a few years ago, generative AI burst onto the scene, launching a transformation that…
