Understand
5 min
Brain Rot & AI Slop: How to Stop Mindless Scrolling
I’m pretty sure your feeds look a lot like mine: AI-generated content everywhere. Some of it is fun. But some of it… hmm. How do I put this? It’s really not great.
There’s a name for that low-quality AI content clogging up our feeds: AI slop.
Today, we’re talking about AI slop and brain rot. How one can feed the other, and how this little duo manages to swallow our attention while giving us very little in return.
But before we go any further, let me introduce myself. The little voice behind these articles is Laureline. I’m the designer and co-founder of Jomo. Since 2022, Thomas and I have been building a simple, highly customizable app to help you take back control of your screen time. And every week, or almost every week, we publish an article to help you make sense of technology and the world around us.
Ready? Let’s go 🚀
What Is AI Slop?
AI slop is low-quality content churned out in large quantities using artificial intelligence. It can take all sorts of forms: images, videos, articles, comments, LinkedIn posts, and even books!
“A recent analysis estimated that more than half of longer English-language posts on LinkedIn are AI-generated.”
— The Guardian, January 2025 [1]
But AI slop doesn’t mean everything made with AI. The distinction matters: it’s about low-quality content produced at scale. Often, the aim is to attract attention, go viral, and ultimately… make money.
“Shrimp Jesus”, Wikipedia.
This image gives you a pretty good idea. Meet Shrimp Jesus. I’ll let the shrimp speak for themselves. The combination of a familiar religious figure and a completely absurd scene is enough to make you stop scrolling and wonder what on earth you’re looking at.
And this style of image already goes back to 2024. Other examples include fake animal rescues, made-up security camera footage, and fabricated clips of older people, people with disabilities, or children doing something extraordinary. All designed to get a reaction. All easy to produce in large quantities.
Which brings us to brain rot.
What Is Brain Rot?
Oxford’s Word of the Year for 2024, “brain rot” describes a supposed decline in our mental sharpness from consuming too much trivial or unchallenging content. It’s an everyday expression, not a diagnosis of brain damage. And AI slop fits pretty neatly into the kind of content people are talking about.
You know the feeling: you’ve spent three hours on TikTok, but what actually happened? You didn’t watch a film, finish an episode, read a book, learn anything you remember, play a game, or talk to anyone. You just watched a stream of forgettable clips, and now your brain feels fried. I’m only exaggerating a little 🤏
It’s also about the pattern. Hours of scrolling, repeated day after day, can take up a lot of space in your life. Especially when you finish feeling drained rather than entertained.
How Can AI Slop Feed Brain Rot?
What AI has changed is how quickly and easily digital content can be produced. Making endless variations of an image or a video takes far less effort than it used to. And when views can bring in money, that’s an attractive proposition.
Meanwhile, recommendation systems pay close attention to how we react. On TikTok, for example, signals such as watch time, likes, and shares help shape what we see. Platforms do have rules and labels for AI-generated content, but a label doesn’t necessarily stop a video from holding our attention.
So imagine a creator churning out dozens of videos a day, testing format after format to find the one that makes people stop scrolling. On the other side, a recommendation system picks up on those reactions and puts the content in front of more people.
It’s easy to see how that can keep a feed supplied with the very kind of content we scroll through for hours, then struggle to remember.
What’s the Problem With AI Slop and Brain Rot?
There are three concerns worth separating: our attention, the habits that keep us scrolling, and our ability to tell what’s real.
1. Constantly Switching Our Attention
Research is moving forward, but we need to be careful about what it actually shows. A systematic review published in 2026 found links between heavier or problematic short-video use and difficulties with attention, cognitive control, and emotional regulation in young adults. It doesn’t establish that scrolling caused those difficulties, or that AI-generated videos have a specific effect of their own.
Still, think about what a scrolling session looks like. Every new clip brings a different person, setting, subject, or emotion. One moment, you’re watching a recipe. Seconds later, it’s a dramatic rescue. Then an argument. Then something so strange you’re not even sure what you just saw.
You keep moving on before you’ve had much time to sit with anything. That can feel exhausting, particularly when the clips have little connection to one another. And with AI slop, the strangeness can be the whole point: enough confusion, surprise, or emotion to keep you watching.
2. Getting Used to “Just One More”
First, a distinction: having trouble focusing after a long scrolling session doesn’t automatically mean you have ADHD. ADHD is a developmental disorder, with symptoms that begin in childhood. It can’t be reduced to a habit of watching short videos.
What we can look at here is the habit itself. You get a stream of quick, surprising, sometimes funny, sometimes shocking clips. There’s almost no effort involved in moving to the next one. And there’s always the possibility that the next video will be better.
That makes “just one more” an easy promise to keep making. You open the app when you’re bored, keep scrolling longer than you intended, and reach for it again the next time there’s a quiet moment. The useful question is whether you’re still choosing to watch, or simply finding it difficult to stop.
3. Struggling to Tell Fiction From Reality
As generative AI tools become more accessible, more synthetic content finds its way online. And some of it can be difficult to distinguish from footage of something that actually happened.
Shrimp Jesus is fairly easy to spot. But a convincing animal rescue? A renovation time-lapse? An image of a public figure doing something they never did? Those can be much harder to judge at a glance.
When images like these spread without their original context, they can mislead people or be used to manipulate them. If a fabricated scene starts being treated as evidence, what happens to our understanding of the story behind it?
Image by David Fathi / Midjourney - RTL.
During France’s pension reform protests in March 2023, AI-generated images showed Emmanuel Macron in imagined protest scenes. RTL reported on the images and the risk of mistaking them for real photographs.
Some were originally shared as clearly identified creations. The problem is that an image can travel much further than its caption. What seems like obvious fiction to one person may look like a record of real events to someone else.
How Can You Protect Yourself From AI Slop and Brain Rot?
The advice you hear most often is simple: just stop using social media. Especially the platforms built around short videos and whatever is most likely to go viral.
Fair enough. But realistically, how many people are going to stick to that?
Here are three more manageable things to try.
1. Clean Up Your Feed
It sounds almost too simple. But when was the last time you spent ten minutes looking at what your feed keeps recommending, and telling it what you don’t want to see?
Depending on the platform, you can mute or block accounts, tap “Not interested,” and filter certain keywords. TikTok, for example, offers controls to help shape your recommendations.
Give your feed a little attention of your own. Follow creators whose work you enjoy, and stop giving every strange AI video another few seconds just to work out how strange it is. The aim is a feed with more variety and more of the content you actually came for.
2. Put a Pause Between You and the App
One of the biggest problems is that these platforms are always within reach. We often open them almost without noticing, especially when we’re bored, waiting for something, or trying to switch off for a minute. Those are easy moments for “a quick look” to turn into a long scroll.
That’s where an app blocker like Jomo, free to download on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, can help you set a boundary. You can keep an app blocked by default. It’s still there, and you can still use it, but opening it takes a deliberate step.
In Jomo, we call these Locks. You open Jomo, complete your chosen unlock exercise, and decide how long you want to use the blocked app. Once that time is up, the app is blocked again automatically.
That little pause gives you a chance to ask: do I actually want to open this, or was my thumb making the decision for me?
3. Get Comfortable With a Little Boredom
Our phones fill so many of the small gaps in our day. And once we open an app, it can be surprisingly hard to leave. You know the famous “five minutes on TikTok” that somehow becomes an hour.
Try letting a few of those gaps stay empty. Wait for your coffee without opening a feed. Look out of the window on the bus. Or choose something else you actually enjoy doing.
Your phone doesn’t have to be your automatic escape from boredom. You deserve breaks that leave you feeling rested, amused, or interested in something, instead of wondering where the last hour went. Your attention is worth looking after. Does every video in your feed really deserve a share of it?
The Takeaway 🍔
The problem isn’t that everything we consume has to be clever. We’re allowed to enjoy silly memes, cat videos, and completely pointless Reels. Our brains don’t need to be productive 24/7.
The problem starts when entertainment stops being entertaining. When we open TikTok out of habit. When we watch fifty videos and can’t remember a single one. When we close Instagram only to open it again thirty seconds later. When we meant to watch one video and end up watching a hundred.
AI can make that pattern even easier to fall into by making content practically endless. It’s becoming easier to generate more text, images, and videos than any one person could consume in a lifetime. In a world where content becomes endless, attention is the scarce resource.
And that brings us to the end of this article. I hope you enjoyed it! If you did, feel free to share it. You can also help us choose the next topic by sending us your ideas here.
If you’d like to try Jomo, use my referral code FG2HA9 to get Jomo Plus free for 14 days.
I wrote this article with my own little hands and my own little brain. Since English isn’t my first language, I used AI for translation and proofreading. ✨
🫡 See you next Monday!
