AI Slop and the Quiet Cost of Foraging

You search something simple. How long to boil an egg. Whether a library has a known CVE. What a word means. And the first page of results is four articles that say the same nothing across six paragraphs apiece, each one warming up with a little essay on the rich cultural history of the egg. You bounce between tabs, skimming, fishing for the one sentence that actually answers you. By the time you find it you’re inexplicably tired, and you file it under your own failing: I can’t focus anymore.

You focused fine. You were foraging, and the forest rotted out from under you.

Maggie Appleton, writing about where the web is headed, nails the moment in five words: people are “jetspraying the web with AI slop.” That verb is perfect. Slop isn’t lies, exactly. It’s text with nobody behind it who cares whether you walk away helped. It gets generated because generating is nearly free, and sprayed because spraying catches clicks. It’s the same rot that powers the dead-internet-and-your-pattern-hungry-brain feeling, just measured at the search bar instead of the comment section.

There’s a theory that explains exactly why this wears you out, and it’s older than the problem. In the late 1990s, Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card at Xerox PARC proposed Information Foraging Theory: humans hunting for information online behave a lot like animals hunting for food. We follow “information scent,” the little cues (a headline, a snippet, a URL) that promise a meal of relevant content somewhere ahead. And we’re constantly, unconsciously weighing one question: is this patch worth digging, or do I cut my losses and move on?

Foraging only works when the scent is honest, when a promising headline reliably opens onto real substance. Slop is engineered to counterfeit the scent. The headline promises the meal; the page serves you packing peanuts. So your foraging instinct, tuned over a lifetime of being online, gets catfished on every other click. Each fake patch costs attention you never get back, and your brain, behaving perfectly sensibly, calls off the hunt and reports back depleted. Your fatigue isn’t weakness. It’s an accurate instrument reading an environment where the signal-to-noise ratio quietly fell through the floor.

This is also where I have to check my own flinch. I want to write, to put work into the world, and the slop flood whispers the obvious discouragement: who needs one more voice? But that’s the logic exactly backwards. When almost every scent is fake, honest scent turns rare, and rare is the whole definition of valuable. A real person showing their actual reasoning, mistakes left in, is suddenly the scarce good on the entire web. The flood doesn’t drown your voice. It marks up the price of the genuine article. Which is the precise wall I keep walking into over in the-pseudo-intellectual-fear.