AI Slop Is Quietly Breaking Google. Publishers Know It.
The flood of machine-written content is not just bad writing. It is a slow-motion poisoning of the thing that feeds it.
There is a feedback loop nobody is proud of. AI scrapes the web, including the AI-written web, and the output gets published back to the web, and the next model eats that.
Publishers feel it first as a quality problem. Search results fill with thin, confident, slightly-wrong articles that all say the same five things. The human-written stuff drowns.
Google says it is fighting this. Maybe it is. But the incentive is weird: the companies publishing the slop are often the same ones selling the models.
I have started adding "written by a human" to things I search for, half joking. The other half is not joking.
The fix is not technical, it is economic. Until original reporting is worth more than generated filler, the filler wins on volume. Always has.