23. 4. 2026

AI slop has oozed into the scientific world. 

For the not-so-chronically-online readers, AI slop is low-effort and often erroneous content created with artificial intelligence (AI) tools and without thorough inspection by the human who wrote the AI prompt in the first place. And its prevalence, together with other netizens’ perceived inability to care about it, really bothers me. Even more so when it is relaying scientifically dubious information. 

To illustrate, I will show some examples from LinkedIn. While I consider this slop, it’s far from the worst of it. These images look fine at first glance, but on a thorough inspection, we can notice some AI artefacts. 

The first one is pretty classic. It uses the “handwritten” font often used in AI-created content. It is correct overall – other than the fact that some words turn into gibberish. 

The second one might be more elusive. This example includes one graphical and one factual inaccuracy. It is also unfortunate, because nice photos of all these assays exist and are more accurate (although less aesthetic) than the AI illustrations. 

The third is an April Fool’s joke! I find this to be a more suitable use of AI. However, it has a few artefacts that I would like to point out. 

As a scientist, I’m led by curiosity. That makes me wonder why people create and engage with AI slop. Are the creators looking to get noticed by an employer, or sell courses? While (semi-successfully) searching for the original authors of the first two images, I discovered that several of these posts have been edited to show different information. 

I wonder, does the audience notice the errors and inaccuracies? Whatever the answer is, we know that the human mind processes simple, aesthetic information as correct, just because it looks that way. 

Therefore, I hope this blog offered some pointers on how to spot AI slop. Spotting AI slop is the first step to engaging with it critically – or skipping it entirely; it is up to you.

Eva Grabner is studying microbiology for the third time, this time at PhD level, focusing on bacterial interactions in human skin microbiota. She has a soft spot for bioinformatics, where she uses AI tools to improve her coding skills. Unrelated to her research, she is fascinated by human behavior around technology, which is more or less why this blog exists. When she gets the chance, she escapes the screen to photograph landscapes and plants, before returning to edit them in open-source software.