From videos of blobby veggies and fruits to “funny” deepfakes of Jeffrey Epstein and Charlie Kirk, Instagram is overrun with AI slop. And conscientious objectors are not having a good time.
Not that other apps fare much better. Bots are choking X as we speak, Reddit is downgrading with each new AI-generated ‘art’ post, and every single LinkedIn write-up seems to come from the same ChatGPT prompt.
It’s official: AI is ruining social media. And that’s the Viral Spiral this week. AI-generated content gets lakhs of views, but at what cost? I dread opening DMs these days to see the latest batch of Reels friends have sent. The slop has achieved the impossible: It made brainrot boring.
Content creator Anjali Harikumar summed up the fatigue in a recent Reel. When her friend showed her a video of a train journey through scenic Scottish landscapes, her first question was, ‘Is this AI?’ And instead of enjoying her Elizabeth Bennet moment, she spent a good five minutes figuring it out.
“I hate that we’re at a point where we can’t trust anything we see online,” she said in the video.
The comments agreed. “I normally don’t consume much AI stuff, but still I happen to see a few and i really don’t like them,” wrote one commenter. “AI everywhere is draining me,” wrote another.
AI cannibalism
I remember when AI first entered social media. The year was 2022, and X was still Twitter—a happier place. Suddenly, accounts were posting weird colour blotches that seemed to be the stepsisters of surrealist or abstract art. AI is making art, the handles proclaimed.
The versions that followed were amusing, to say the least. Humans in these ‘artworks’ would be missing limbs or sporting several extra thumbs. But AI art had its biggest social media moment in 2025 with the Ghibli trend. The images the AI model churned out were all yellowish, an aftereffect of whatever jaundiced art and photos it was trained on.
And the yellow tint stuck, a fixture on AI images long after the trend was over. It was proof that the models were feeding on AI-generated content. People called it AI cannibalism. That’s what AI is in the popular imagination—a beast that devours human creations to hallucinate strange mutants. Tech bros and social media AI ‘first movers’ will call me an anti-AI purist, but I will merely laugh at the absurdity of the term.
AI content is the latest, likely fatal chapter of the dead internet theory. Every other account is a bot or a person posting AI content, and social media is getting less social by the day. But artists are keeping up the fight.
“Bad art is better than AI,” wrote Monisha Blessy in the caption of her Reel posted Thursday. But the commenters weren’t having it. Her simple sketch, to them, was actually great art.
In a Reel posted on Wednesday, artist Anoushka used her own art to recreate the iconic teacup scene from Uptown Girls (2003). Most Instagram creators used AI to participate in the trend. “This trend, but I didn’t burn 1000 trees to make it,” the text on screen read.
“Bad art is better than AI art” is the campaign slogan for these neo-Luddites. And the way the India AI Summit went, I don’t think they have much to worry about.
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(Edited by Ratan Priya)