From loudmouthed AI chatbots to ridiculous e-commerce product summaries, “AI slop”, which is defined as low-quality and generally unwanted AI-generated content, reached a new peak in 2025. Indeed AI-generated articles now make up more than half of all English-language content on the web, according to search engine optimisation firm Graphite. And so, in AI slop environments, designers find themselves under commercial pressure 'to start from the solution and work backwards to find the problem', say researchers at Nielsen Norman Group. That is, product designers have been tasked with integrating AI almost anywhere and everywhere even when it might make little sense. And so, there has been a reaction against the amount of AI slop spreading on the web although, as the research suggests the tide seems to be turning against AI slop making way for more intentional product design and strategy that focuses on impact. Interestingly, working backwards from problem to solution has a parallel in the found object art, that is, a non-art item or ordinary manufactured objects is designated as art, aka readymades, as pioneered by the conceptual artist, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). That is, Duchamp put his idea about the object and then calling it art. André Breton, the co-founder of surrealism, defined a readymade as a ‘manufactured object raised to the dignity of works of art through the choice of the artist'. Readymades are considered a viable artist practice although still open to questioning.
