Week of Aug. 20, 2026

From the editor’s desk

You know those misleading images, articles, social-media posts and videos generated with artificial intelligence—intended to elicit your sympathy, or stoke your rage, or just keep you clicking?

By last year, they were cluttering our lives so much that Merriam-Webster’s, America’s go-to dictionary, deemed “slop” the 2025 word of the year, explaining: 

We define slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”

Now that we’re nearly two-thirds through 2026, the proliferation of AI slop is getting worse and worse. One egregious use of AI made the news this week.

On Monday, Michigan’s Interlochen Public Radio reported that 200 AI-generated publications launched in May by Prism News, a start-up based in Israel, had closed. According to Poynter, the closures came after “investigations from multiple outlets that exposed plagiarism and falsehoods.”

From Interlochen Public Radio:

This includes the local “AI-powered newsroom” Prism Grand Traverse County, which produced news articles about northwest Michigan. As IPR reported in July, that coverage was created using artificial intelligence to aggregate news from local outlets and repurpose Prism’s slightly-altered articles under new bylines.

None of those bylines belonged to real people. Instead, they represented “AI-personas.” One of those personas even carried the title “Dr.” — Elena Rodriguez.

The team at Poynter (who shortened “Prism News” here to “Prism” but were careful to point out that it is not to be confused with Prism, the nonprofit POC newsroom)—had this to say:

There was plenty of reason for skepticism. Prism closely resembled pink slime—websites that masquerade as legitimate local news outlets—and described its vision like this: “This is bigger than better journalism. This is the complete reinvention of how humanity stays informed. What if Bloomberg, Vice, and CNN were born today, with zero humans, zero legacy, and infinite AI scale?”

Wait—the reinvention of how humanity does what? Stays informed? In reality, entities like Prism are doing a lot to make sure we stay misinformed.

To the Prism marketers, “zero humans, zero legacy and AI scale” were selling points. To me, they make me want to curl up with a fifth of bourbon and rewatch (or read) 2001: A Space Odyssey 10 or 15 times.

I’m not saying I think AI is going to kill us. I’m just saying that a big, long “I told you so” in the form of Arthur C. Clarke’s novel or Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film of the same name—in which, long story short, an AI machine named HAL 9000 kills the humans—would hit the spot right now.

Poynter and Interlochen Public Radio are sick of AI slop, too. According to a New York Times piece posted this week, even the tech giants that enable its production are drowning in it.

The Times reported that Spotify removed 75 million bulk uploads and other spam (“a sizable chunk of its total portfolio”) in 2025, and that “LinkedIn said in July that ‘A.I. slop is a top priority for all of us’ and developed a button for users to report it.”

Here’s where it gets really meta. From the Times: “Across the internet, tech companies are undertaking a generative waste detox, overwhelmed in many cases by the same slop first made possible by their own A.I. tools.”

How are the tech giants combatting the AI slop produced by their own AI tools? With those same AI tools.

Take care,

—Kris Vagner, managing editor