Like all newsworthy events now, the current Iran war has brought about, as the New York Times reported in March, “a cascade of AI fakes” that have filled the feeds of social platforms.1 Sometimes these clips serve explicitly propagandistic aims, hoping to melt enemy morale or forward a false sense of what happened, yet more often they are merely opportunistic, promulgated not by one side or another but by info-war profiteers eager to provide material for media platforms to populate users’ feeds so that every time they refresh it they find something new and interesting, unhampered by any of the lags in traditional verified reporting or the constraints of needing to find genuine sources and illustrative details. Such clips cater to an audience that might vaguely think it wants to “monitor the situation” but is also possibly just merely bored and hoping their phone will keep them amused.
Regardless of their overt political slant, such clips are indifferent to whether they inform or misinform, as long as they hold our measurable attention. They are simply propaganda for themselves—for the idea that all news can and should ultimately be experienced as entertainment. On-demand footage should exist of anything that might fit with any user’s expectations of what they should be seeing, and not necessarily what has actually occurred. Everyone should see content that rewards the tiniest amount of attention with a comforting sense of having already gotten the point.
Cumulatively, these kinds of clips don’t add up to an overarching narrative, not even a false one. Instead, they encourage a post-narrative mode in which enjoying memes and feeling up to date on the condition of the world don’t depend on understanding the complexities of the bigger picture or getting more context. Instead, news footage—simulated or real—is treated as freely combinable with other material from the cultural archive, allowing us to enjoy spotting the formulas and references with no heed to propriety or decorum, let alone facticity. When the Trump White House mixes war footage with scenes from action movies, video-game screengrabs, or pro sports highlights, it is seizing on this post-narrative approach, which corresponds to Trump’s indifference to coherently explaining why he thinks the war needs to be fought. Like the memes, it is self-explanatory: You get it or you don’t.
This content-creator opportunism has long held true for all sorts of news events. During this past blizzard-laden winter in the U.S., it wasn’t unusual to see video fakes online showing simulated auto accidents: One typical clip showed a silver sedan spinning out on an icy highway, causing the 18-wheeler directly behind it to jackknife, sending its trailer pirouetting over the car, which emerged curiously unscathed as the truck’s cab slammed into a concrete lane divider. It’s not altogether implausible, and perhaps a few years ago, before generative models had reached their current proficiency (and before platforms began withdrawing resources from content moderation), it might have been convincing to many viewers. But no one is fooled for long now. Everyone’s seen plenty of AI slop.
Such low-stakes clips are in some ways more revealing about the effect of deepfakes, which have long troubled commentators warning of an incipient crisis in truth in which no one will be able to trust what they see in media, pushing us toward a paralyzing disbelief of everything. The truck-crash video’s Facebook caption describes it as “A shocking incident captured by a traffic camera,” drawing on the reality of ubiquitous surveillance to give it a veneer of credibility. Yet if you click on “See more,” you’ll find that the full text ends with a disclaimer, forthrightly declaring “this video is created using AI, and the story is for your entertainment.” That is about as coherent as Trump’s explanations for the Iran war, but coherence is no more the point of this clip than being real or accurate. The point, of course, is to crack the demands of a platform’s algorithms—the primary consumers of clips such as these. Viewers are suspended between two algorithmic systems, one that generates the content and one that shows it to us, having our attention harvested to help train them to converge.
But why would any actual person want to watch something fake? This might seem like a natural question if you think of social media feeds as news, but it’s silly to ask this about entertainment. We engage with various forms of fiction all the time, in part because we like wish fulfillment, escapism, the feeling of suspending disbelief, and the apparent confirmation of our beliefs and biases. It can be satisfying when something we maybe couldn’t imagine so vividly looks just like we would have expected, just like we’d want it to. This subordinates the complexity and overwhelmingness of events to our personal response. It’s more important for them to be emotionally legible than genuine—graspable in an instant.
AI slop clips often latch on to news stories and try to show viewers what the news would be like if it could be stripped of its context and presented as maximally engaging to an individual user. In another fake clip, this one of a dog pulling a stroller out of oncoming traffic, the caption asserts that what’s shown is “similar to real events that have taken place,” as if on the implicit understanding that an approximation is not only sufficient but perhaps preferable. Why settle for a real event when you can consume an enhanced and heightened reality presented in a similar idiom? These clips aren’t trying to justify themselves through ultimately being convincing, but rather by being diverting. They show us something that doesn’t ask for our belief but instead presumes our suspended disbelief, our willingness to go along without bothering to assess the validity of everything.
Both of these clips, purported to be filmed by mounted surveillance cameras, depend on an idea of what viewers expect visual evidence to look like, but convert that expectation into a purely formal component, something that is just another trope to play with. Like the war clips, they are not so much indifferent to facts as parasitical on the means of establishing them, illustrating how evidence can be produced as content — that is, as media shaped by the incentives of social media feeds — and ultimately as slop: low-effort content whose production can be increasingly automated.
Evidence establishes the factuality of something regardless of whether people want to pay attention to it or believe it; content simply caters to and reinforces the desire for spectacle. As evidence and content have come to co-mingle in feeds, it has created a confusion between the two. Evidence-like material becomes an alibi for spectacle; it mimics verifiability but invites us to disavow any need for verification. We can experience what we see as true without having to fit it into a narrative or a confirming context. Like a magic trick, it temporarily short-circuits skepticism to allow for a kind of pleasure in simply accepting what we perceive. Such clips also reinforce the feeling that it is more fun to be tricked than informed, and that indifference to truth yields instant emotional rewards.
Sometimes, as with magic, generated clips portray miraculous or catastrophic or impossible events, catering to escapism. But more often than not they present even the most far-fetched scenarios in the humdrum and familiar format of short-form video content. Slop especially caters to an idea that anything should be viewable, especially in a world so saturated with surveillance as ours: Hasn’t surveillance already reached omnipresence, and shouldn’t omnipotence follow? This corresponds with the idea that generative models already contain everything that could possibly be perceived in its matrix of billions of data parameters. Slop clips deliver on both fantasies at once: AI can show you anything, and it is truer than ordinary truth.
So opportunists can try to identify apparent gaps in news stories—holes in what an algorithm might want to show viewers—and use generative AI to fill them, as with attempts to conjure the face of Nancy Guthrie’s suspected abductor, or to augment footage of ICE shootings in Minneapolis. These clips can aim to satisfy a ghoulish curiosity or cater to schadenfreude—when a Chinese skiier was mauled after trying to take a photo with a snow leopard, generated fakes of that selfie circulated—or they can be more overtly political, as with the official White House account’s ongoing meme campaign. There are fake videos of urban decline and fake videos of Jeffrey Epstein, fake videos of bombings in Gaza and Ukraine and now Iran, fakes about basically anything that somebody out there may have feelings about.
These images proliferate not because they are mistaken as authentic documents but because, as Claire Wilmot argued in a piece for the London Review of Books, they “offer clear, illustrative diagnoses” of “alleged problems”—they are “showing everyone what’s really happening,” as someone knowingly sharing anti-immigrant deepfakes tells her.2 The clips don’t offer factual information—which would underscore our inability to intervene in the large-scale events immiserating us—but ideology, saving us the effort of having to think things through.
Generated video caters to an audience’s desire to see their hunches appear in the form of evidence, and consume what they already think as if it is being demonstrated by events. They visualize simple explanations for us so that we don’t have to put effort into them or take responsibility for them. These kinds of clips allow us to experience our own half-acknowledged beliefs as content without having to “really” believe in them. They just appear before our eyes to provide reassurance. They are self-verifying for their audience because they depict an idea that the audience already takes for granted.
The steady flow of such material normalizes the idea that the news will immediately be recast into more satisfying shapes, and that we can depend on our feeds to allow us to modulate our emotions and be fed a kind of clarity, if not relief—a manageable rhythm of disbelief repeatedly resuspending itself. The flow of images, and the emotional regulation it affords, outweighs the impact of any particular image or video. This flow serves as an ongoing intervention to neutralize other less convenient content.
There is some consolation in calling this kind of content slop, which implies that it is obvious garbage that everyone already sees right through. Our disavowal of our desire for these clips, and the effect they have on us, is built right into the term. Slop’s dismissibility is part of its appeal; it makes deception seem apparent and contained, dismissible by viewers whenever they decide to really think about it. Slop flatters us by letting us feel in on the fakeness while enjoying the view of the world it puts forward. It offers a discourse that is not hard to keep up with, one that delivers a constant sense of wins, of recognition, of getting it without trying. It panders like a sycophant chatbot.
The underlying message of all content is that we should be able to see what we want to believe without having to invest effort into building that reality. Slop may have its social uses—animating unimaginative group chats, perhaps—but mainly it invites us to isolate ourselves. Its harms are not so much in persuading us of something nonfactual, but in eroding the sense of collective responsibility for shared information. Rather than seeking out information from a recognition of our personal ignorance and out of a sense of civic responsibility—to help build and participate in a political world shared by others, grounded in ideas that have been collectively developed and articulated—we can ingest massive quantities of simulated information and clumsy propaganda that makes us feel full of ourselves. If civic duty as a purpose for becoming informed has already begun to atrophy, slop circulation aims to obliterate it entirely.
Another way to put this is that the era of evidence is over, and there is only content. But the problem can’t be addressed by trying to overwhelm content and slop with a steady diet of truth—genuine documentary images and “real” evidence. Frequently, critics react to slop virality with nostalgia for when the mass media monopolized and rationed the distribution of the images that made for a shared sense of what was happening, the photographic record, a set of images everyone would see and could keep up with. That media environment seemed to provide trusted media institutions with ethical limits on commercialization and ideological polarization, a clearer separation of news and entertainment, and no ability to affiliate oneself with news events by rebroadcasting them, making every moment a chance to gain attention for oneself or enjoy parasocial participation in an us vs. them framework.
As any number of 20th-century media critics argued, the media industry subordinated truth to spectacle, winnowed out opposing viewpoints and marginalized voices, parceled out “reality” in commercialized bites, and imposed a false consensus. Still, in our current slop era, there is a tendency to romanticize mass media as a golden age of “seeing is believing,” overlooking its coercive power and narrow perspective, and acting as though the images themselves compelled consensus and belief through their documentary fidelity—that media could be self-evidently true or false, with unmistakable moral implications: The image of the napalm girl imposing ethical clarity about the Vietnam War on everyone who sees it.
It would be convenient if “documentation” could absolve us of politics and align people automatically to some objectively correct position that a certain view on reality would seem to some to compel. But this idea that an image can do our political thinking for us—that they require no interpretation and simply convey an inarguable truth—is essentially reactionary, the same idea that animates AI slop and other forms of propaganda, that what we see should be enough to dictate what we believe. The AI images and the “true-in-themselves” empirical images reflect the same laziness with respect to taking and owning one’s view of the world. In social feeds, those two kinds of spontaneous truths are continually brought together, destabilizing them both, with only the momentum of the feed, our continual engagement with images and submersion in media, sustaining their apparent purchase on reality.
The “crisis of truth” doesn’t derive from some newfound power of media to trick us, but from the sense that consuming media alone is enough to let us live in the real world. But no images can give us a privileged relation to the truth, an automatic awareness of objective reality, a better sense of empathy, or a surer moral compass. No media can liberate us from mediation. Engaging with media doesn’t mean “monitoring the situation”—it entails being involved in the propaganda war, not wallowing in slop.
Instead of consuming images from media circulating through our feeds, free from any particular interpretive context, we might instead build specific context for understanding by tending to the social relationships, institutions, conversations, and ongoing investments that make interpretation viable. This is what being politically engaged amounts to, not expecting an information diet alone to do the work for us. Think about the way Minnesota activists framed their practice as being observers—not simply saying, “Watch our footage,” but instead demonstrating that bearing witness is a collective practice that becomes stronger the more people do it, and produces solidarity along with a shared view of reality. The Trump administration, in its quest for cruel content, pushes the opposite view: Consume content and “enjoy” the sensations and reactions it prompts you to feel in your isolation; just look at your phone, rather than working together with others to point it at something else.
NOTES
1 Stuart A. Thompson and Alexander Cardia, “Cascade of A.I. Fakes About War With Iran Causes Chaos Online.” March 13, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/03/14/business/media/iran-disinfo-artificial-intelligence.html
2 Claire Wilmot, “Fascistic Dream Machines.” Sept. 24, 2025. https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/september/fascistic-dream-machines
Video: Example of AI slop clips on Facebook. “Dog ran to stop a stroller that was moving towards the road where a truck was coming at high speed and the dog ended up stopping and saving the stroller and was given an award for being a hero” (Accessed May 12, 2026).
