Slopaganda = Slop + Propaganda.
While slop can also originate from sloppy reporters working in the mainstream media, in the context of slopaganda, it refers to the output of Generative Artificial Intelligence products like ChatGPT from OpenAI and Claude from Anthropic.
There’s a growing genre of mainstream media commentary warning about the rise of AI-generated text, images and videos. The commentary is replete with claims, critiques and advice to readers, with the subtext that all genAI output is slop.
In this blog post, I’ll take 10 MSM narratives about slopaganda and do a reality check of each of them vis-a-vis the underlying reality of how incentives, practices, and business models within mainstream media have driven the very outcomes now being criticized.
Think of it as “Narrative vs. Reality Check“.
Let’s get on with it.
Narrative 1: Nonstop slop flood wears down our ability to separate fact from fiction.
Reality Check: Sure but this happened well before AI. As I highlighted in my two part blog posts entitled “Why Is It So Hard To Spot Fake News?” (Part 1 and Part 2) published well before ChatGPT was a glint in Sam Altman’s eyes, readers have always gravitated towards sources that reinforced their longheld beliefs, preconceived notions, and preexisting biases. They will continue to do that with slopaganda: She who believes in Trumpisms will believe it whether it’s generated by Trump or AI.
Narrative 2: Real journalism gets buried under mountains of AI-generated trash.
Reality Check: “Real journalism” comprises sourcing news from “unnamed sources”. To be honest, this playbook was always dubious. Just that the common man or woman (or “J6P” for Joe Six Pack or Jane Six Pack) had no other alternative – until social media came along.
Alt-Media via socials, podcasts, and newsletters has exposed the shortcomings of the MSM playbook and provided an alternative. When I can directly read what Elon says, why do I need a “real journalist” to be the gatekeeper?
Narrative 3: Deepfakes show up fast before real reporters even get started.
Reality Check: This is a lame claim. Gone are the days of real reporters.
During the Balkan Wars, I’ve literally seen bombs blowing up behind Christian Amanpour while she tirelessly reported live for CNN from Belgrade, Sarajevo, Srebrenica, and other hotspots.
Whereas “real reporters” of today sit in their rooms, and get their updates on what’s happening in the warzones outside their hotels by talking to their room service waiters.
Narrative 4: Slopaganda crumbles trust, making “everything is fake” the default mindset.
Reality Check: That’s not such a bad thing. Some amount of critical thinking always helps J6P. Besides, MSM contradicts this narrative when the opposite framing suits its purpose, as we’ll see in a minute.
Also let’s not forget that many MSM articles these days are copy pasta of posts from X fka Twitter. See ‘Catturd’ Sparks MAGA Uproar With Post About New Legal Troubles in Newsweek for a canonical example.
Narrative 5: World depends on content that no human ever reviewed or fact checked before publishing.
Reality Check: Oh, c’mon, going by my firsthand experience in the past four to five years, I seriously doubt if any human reviews or fact checks MSM output before it’s published.
In my blog post titled MSM Exhibits Lamp Kettle Syndrome, I highlighted several gaffes in MSM articles like mixing up millions, billions, and trillions with one another; conflating minimum and maximum temperatures; and expanding NATO as North American Treaty Organization. MSM has no locus standi to act Holier than Thou about lack of reviewing or fact checking in Alt-Media.
MSM also has a serious attitude and knowledge problem when it comes to technology and business, as Martin Peers pointed out in a recent The Briefing newsletter in The Information.
“Reporters have too much of a gotcha mentality and too little understanding of tech or business” ~ @mvpeers @theinformation.
+1. Nice to hear this from a reporter.
Exhibit A: Hunterbrook is the future of media. https://t.co/kovsQoRsKf. #OpenAI #TBPN. pic.twitter.com/OIH8nRNv73— SKR (@s_ketharaman) April 16, 2026
Narrative 6: The same AI tools that write convincing headlines today will soon produce videos, voices and whole fake interviews.
Reality Check: Sure they will. By saying this, traditional journos are only outing their severe anxiety about being overtaken by AI.
Narrative 7: Skepticism isn’t just healthy, it’s powerful.
Reality Check: LOL, the same MSM that earlier ranted against the tendency of readers to be skeptical now wants them to be skeptical!
Basically, when it suits their purpose, traditional journalists wants readers to be gullible and when it doesn’t suit their purpose, they want the same readers to be skeptical. Nice try!
Narrative 8: Look for awkward wording, strange details, and things that don’t add up.
Reality Check: Unfortunately, this won’t help readers distinguish between MSM and slopaganda.
As I pointed out here, newspaper and magazine articles are full of awkward wording and worse.
Language quality is no longer an acid test to distinguish between human and AI output. As a matter of fact, text produced by genAI is mostly free of language mistakes. In 1000+ convos with ChatGPT over three years, I can’t recall ChatGPT making a single typo or grammatical error. I can’t say that of even some of the best human writers in the world today like Matt Levine, Byrne Hobart, and @patio11.
I’ve seen my share of typos where MSM mixes up million, billion, trillion; expands NATO as North American Treaty Organization; reports Pune temperature as 4 degrees Celsius. But this one by FT is arguably the biggest gaffe of them all.
Fuck It era v. Fucking era. pic.twitter.com/kRMtnTKn3x— SKR (@s_ketharaman) April 22, 2026
On a side note, if an LLM’s fact-finding module (allegedly) suffers from hallucination due to its stochastic nature, how come its text composition module does not?
Narrative 9: Needs regulation e.g. EU AI Act.
Reality Check: This is silly. People spreading slopaganda are breaking all kinds of laws. Are they really going to obey a law that tells them to mark their AI content as synthetic?
I thought so, too.
Narrative 10: Keep AI away and truth alive.
Reality Check: Total BS. This is nothing more than a clear sign of MSM exhibiting what I call Upton Sinclair Syndrome.
