Before algorithms determined what appeared in our feeds, we could open a website and see what our friends were posting. We customized MySpace pages, shared random thoughts on Facebook, uploaded videos to YouTube, and spent hours browsing forums and blogs. The internet was far from perfect, but much of what we saw came directly from people who created something they wanted to share. This is the social media experience that many millennials remember and yearn for because it was foundational to when social media rewarded personal expression over commercialization.
Platforms began tuning algorithms to determine what content people saw, while influencers learned how to optimize their posts for engagement. The more people watched, clicked, commented, and shared, the more likely algorithms would showcase content. Social media went from a place of personal expression to a curated and commercialized space that lacked the authenticity it once had. Just as the curated influencer space became more dominant, AI slop started to saturate content feeds, making social media an even less authentic experience.
Social Media Was Original and Creative
The early internet was not necessarily better than today's internet. It had plenty of spam, misinformation, low-quality content, and questionable websites. The difference is the amount of content people could produce and the population of the internet relative to the ease of access to it at the time. Millennials who grew up with early social media remember how much effort went into creating content. Making a video involved recording it with a webcam, editing it on a computer, rendering the final file, and uploading it to meet format requirements and limitations on a given website. Creating an edited image or graphic often required learning software such as Photoshop, Gimp, or finding someone who already knew how to use the software.
Those skill limitations created a natural barrier to how much content one person could produce. Social media was still messy, but much of it came from people who were participating because they wanted to express themselves, entertain others, share a hobby, or contribute to a community. That doesn't mean everything was meaningful. Millennials were perfectly capable of posting plenty of cringeworthy or malicious content.
Social Media Became a Curated
As social media platforms grew, the way content was distributed changed. Instead of seeing what our friends or people we follow posted, algorithms increasingly showed content it decided was best for our feeds based on trends. Engagement became one of the most important currencies on the internet. Creators were encouraged to post consistently, understand trends, and follow platform recommendations that kept people watching. This created an entirely new incentive to become a viral influencer.
The goal for content became something that performed well first. Authenticity, purpose, and personality became an afterthought. This system created opportunities for many new content creators to grow by system optimization. The same system also created an environment where producing more content could mean more opportunities to capture attention. AI would eventually make that process of creating content easier. AI can be an incredible creative tool, but the same technology that helps people create can also be abused to produce large amounts of generic, repetitive material. This is known as AI slop. It's defined by low-effort, mass-produced content created to capture attention rather than provide something meaningful.
AI Removed the Media Production Bottleneck
AI has dramatically lowered the barrier to content creation. Someone who previously needed graphic design experience can generate an image with a prompt. Someone who isn't comfortable writing can use AI to produce an article or social media post. Video generation tools can create visuals without a camera, actors, or traditional editing software.
These tools can help people turn ideas into reality or even fast-track ideas from concept to production when used responsibly. The problem is when AI allows someone to produce a large volume of generic, meaningless content with little effort. A platform can quickly become flooded with media that technically qualify as content but provide little substance when AI slop oversaturates feeds. The internet doesn't necessarily have a shortage of content anymore. Users constantly express disapproval of anything that's AI-generated.
New opportunities to earn and changes to the YouTube Partner Program
YouTube Is Putting Limits on AI Content Farming
YouTube is one of the platforms beginning to address this problem.
The company recently clarified its policies surrounding what it considers "inauthentic content" for creators participating in the YouTube Partner Program. Rather than banning AI-generated content outright, YouTube is focusing on content that is mass-produced, repetitive, generic, or created primarily for generating revenue. The updated guidance identifies several types of content that can lose monetization eligibility.
The first involves repetitive or template-based content that can be easily reproduced at scale, including videos with little variation from one upload, like reaction videos. The second focuses on content designed to be distressing or emotionally manipulative simply to generate views. The third involves AI personas discussing sensitive subjects such as healthcare, finance, legal matters, and other areas where viewers may reasonably expect reliable expertise. YouTube's position is important because the company isn't saying that AI itself is the problem. YouTube's message is essentially that AI-assisted creativity is welcome, but AI-powered content farming and content farms in general aren't.
Keeping conversations real on LinkedIn
LinkedIn Wants People Back
LinkedIn is approaching the problem from a different direction.
The platform is oriented for professional networking and career building. Generic AI-generated posts and comments can create a different type of problem. LinkedIn says it has been seeing an increase in AI slop, polished-looking content that lacks unique perspective, substance, or lived expertise. The company is taking steps to reduce the distribution of generic business content and crack down on automation tools that allow users to create posts and comments at scale. This includes comments that repeat what someone else has already said without adding anything new for engagement farming.
LinkedIn is also targeting fake AI profiles that take away from the purpose of discussing careers with real people. The company reported that its initial testing correctly identified generic content 94% of the time. Content identified as generic is less likely to be distributed beyond a user's immediate network and users can report posts with the new "Seems like AI slop" button. YouTube is largely focused on preventing low-quality content from becoming a monetization strategy. LinkedIn is focused on preventing low-quality content from taking away professional conversations on its platform. Both platforms are responding to the same fundamental problem that results from AI slop content farming.
What Happens When Gen Alpha Inherits the Internet?
This discussion becomes even more important when considering the generation growing up with AI. Millennials were taught to question what they saw online. We were told that strangers on the internet might not be who they claimed to be. We learned that photos could be edited, information could be misleading, and not everything we read online was true. Gen Alpha is growing up with content that might not even be made by a person. AI can generate fictional people, images, voices, videos, comments, and entire streams of content. A child scrolling through a social media feed may encounter something that looks real to an untrained eye. Digital literacy will have to evolve. We have to teach them not to assume there is a real person behind all the content they see and what to look for to authenticate real content.
The Internet Needs Creative Madness Again
Social media has spent years encouraging people to create more, post more often, join more conversations. Follow trends to retain views. AI took those incentives and made producing content easier than ever. Now platforms are beginning to recognize that unlimited content can become a problem too. YouTube is attempting to keep AI-powered content farms from turning monetization into a numbers game. LinkedIn is trying to preserve genuine professional conversations by reducing generic posts and automated engagement.
Neither approach means AI is going away. Instead, these changes suggest that social media platforms are beginning to place greater value on originality, authenticity, expertise, and human perspective, similar to the internet we remember. Millennials yearn for a version of the internet where creating something usually meant that someone cared enough to make it. AI doesn't have to eliminate that part of the internet. If used correctly, it can help people create more. The internet doesn't necessarily need another million pieces of content. Sometimes, it just needs something worth talking about.