AI Slop: a discussion about good enough technologies at Fusion Festival 2026

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The internet has been a mess for a while. Clickbait, fake news, endless content that says very little, images of nothing – just a constant stream of crappy, sloppy stuff. Now AI/LLMs are making it worse. With tools like ChatGPT, we can produce huge amounts of text, images, and ideas in seconds. A lot of it sounds convincing. A lot of it looks finished. But much of it is…kind of empty. Slightly off. Just okay. So how do we make sense of this? In this session, we bring in two sociologists to think through this growing pile of »AI slop.« One way to understand it is through the idea of »good enoughness.« Most technologies aren’t designed to be perfect – they’re designed to be good enough to work. AI supercharges this. It produces content that feels usable and complete, regardless of whether it’s shallow or wrong. That’s how slop spreads: it passes. In this session we will discuss the following questions: What is AI slop and how did it get here? Why are technologies just meant to be good enough? Who is actually producing all this slop – AI, or us? We’ll share a few short, real examples from how people actually use AI at work and in everyday life. And then we open it up to you: Bring your weirdest AI outputs, your frustrations, your favorite uses – or your skepticism. Let’s try to make sense of the mess together.