As the US midterm elections approach, voters are increasingly concerned about artificial intelligence. According to an NBC News poll, 57% of registered voters believe the risks of AI outweigh its benefits. A Pew Research poll indicates that 61% of adults under 30 think more AI in society will make people worse at creative thinking. Furthermore, a Quinnipiac poll shows that 74% of Americans believe the government is not doing enough to regulate AI.
These concerns are not unfounded. CEOs of major AI companies have adopted a strategy of fear, urging users to embrace AI or be left behind. This narrative is accompanied by predictions that AI will destroy entire industries and cultural institutions. However, the actual benefits of AI disruption remain questionable. A Goldman Sachs study found that AI's impact on productivity is negligible, while it has introduced a new form of bureaucracy: “workslop,” defined by Harvard Business Review as LLM-generated output that creates an illusion of productivity but requires correction.
The term “slop,” Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2025, refers to low-quality digital content produced in quantity by AI. Examples include fake bands on Spotify, absurd AI-hallucinated recipes, and AI-generated books on Amazon. Even Google’s AI overviews provide millions of incorrect answers per hour, overwhelming legitimate search results.
In response, some politicians have proposed measures like a “pause” on AI or universal basic income, but these miss the mark. A more targeted solution is a “slop tax” on the largest AI companies. This tax would levy approximately 1% of annual revenue from companies like Nvidia, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Meta, which together represent $18 trillion in value. The funds would support cultural institutions, artists, and researchers whose work has been used as training data for AI models.
The slop tax is straightforward: any company that furnishes or hosts generative AI content would pay an annual levy of about 1%. This revenue would go into a public fund to distribute grants to cultural organizations, local radio, newspapers, publishers, and educational programs. It would help restore balance to a system where AI companies extract value from human creativity without compensation.
AI slop is unlike other technological disruptions because it aims to replace human creativity rather than augment it. While frontier AI research should continue, replacing institutions that nurture cognitive sovereignty carries a steep cultural cost. A slop tax would limit these threats and ensure that human creators are not forced to compete with a flood of meaningless content.
Ultimately, AI slop is a bet that society will accept an inferior substitute for human creation. Democratic institutions like schools, newspapers, and museums exist to foster human flourishing, not to be optimized by AI. A small tax on the worst aspects of the industry could spark a cultural renaissance, turning anxiety into opportunity.
