Cat soap operas and babies trapped in space: the ‘AI slop’ taking over YouTube; The Guardian, August 11, 2025

Priya Bharadia , The Guardian; Cat soap operas and babies trapped in space: the ‘AI slop’ taking over YouTube

"One expert said AI video generators herald the next wave of internet “enshittification”, a term first used by the British-Canadian author Cory Doctorow. Coined in 2022, Doctorow used it to describe the decline in quality of users’ online experiences, as platforms prioritise profit over offering high-quality content.

“AI slop is flooding the internet with content that essentially is garbage,” said Dr Akhil Bhardwaj, an associate professor at the University of Bath’s school of management. “This enshittification is ruining online communities on Pinterest, competing for revenue with artists on Spotify and flooding YouTube with poor quality content.”

“One way for social media companies to regulate AI slop is to ensure that it cannot be monetised, thus stripping away the incentive for generating it.”

Ryan Broderick, the author of the popular Garbage Day newsletter on internet culture, is scathing about the impact of AI video, writing last week that YouTube has become a “dumping ground for disturbing, soulless AI shorts”.

Video and audio from my closing keynote at Friday's Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain; BoingBoing, January 27, 2019

Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing; Video and audio from my closing keynote at Friday's Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain

"On Friday, hundreds of us gathered at the Internet Archive, at the invitation of Creative Commons, to celebrate the Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain, just weeks after the first works entered the American public domain in twenty years.
 
I had the honor of delivering the closing keynote, after a roster of astounding speakers. It was a big challenge and I was pretty nervous, but on reviewing the saved livestream, I'm pretty proud of how it turned out.

Proud enough that I've ripped the audio and posted it to my podcast feed; the video for the keynote is on the Archive and mirrored to Youtube.

The whole event's livestream is also online, and boy do I recommend it."

I’ve Created a Monster!; Slate, May 22, 2017

Cory Doctorow, Slate; 

I’ve Created a Monster!

"I’m a Facebook vegan. I won’t even use WhatsApp or Instagram because they’re owned by Facebook. That means I basically never get invited to parties; I can’t keep up with what’s going on in my daughter’s school; I can’t find my old school friends or participate in the online memorials when one of them dies. Unless everyone you know chooses along with you not to use Facebook, being a Facebook vegan is hard. But it also lets you see the casino for what it is and make a more informed choice about what technologies you depend on...

Your mobile device, your social media accounts, your search queries, and your Facebook posts— those juicy, detailed, revelatory Facebook posts—contain everything the NSA can possibly want to know about whole populations, and those populations foot the bill for its gathering of that information.

The adjacent possible made Facebook inevitable, but individual choices by technologists and entrepreneurs made Facebook into a force for mass surveillance. Opting out of Facebook is not a personal choice but a social one, one that you brave on your own at the cost of your social life and your ability to stay in touch with the people you love.

Frankenstein warns of a world where technology controls people instead of the other way around. Victor has choices to make about what he does with technology, and he gets those choices wrong again and again. But technology doesn’t control people: People wield technology to control other people."