Dead Letters

I Built a Slop Factory and a Bot Wanted To Feature It

Building a satirical AI slop generator, getting auto-scouted by what is almost certainly another bot, and why the internet is slowly eating itself

The Slopinator 9000

The Slopinator 9000 is satire. The README says so, twice. The caution banner says so. The publishing steps are no-ops. I named the GitHub project and account "slopinator-9000". I genuinely did not think I needed to be more obvious about it.

The premise is a direct joke about "velocity culture", the attitude in tech where shipping anything, fast, is intrinsically virtuous regardless of whether it's original, useful, or good. The project automates the churn of new (most likely AI generated) projects I see constantly. It scouts what's popular, launders it through an LLM to produce a "new idea", implements it with a coding agent, and announces it to the world. No human needed.

And it was mostly one-shot implemented by Opus 4.6 too.

I figured it'd get maybe three stars from people who thought it was funny and that would be that.

The Email

The same day I published it, I got this in my inbox:

Hi there,

I hope this message finds you well! I'm [name] from PitchHut. We came across your project Slopinator 9000 and would love to invite you to showcase it on our platform...

PitchHut had created a pitch page (probably autonomously with an LLM) for my satirical slop generator. Here is the preview they sent:

The Slopinator 9000 is an autonomous pipeline that rapidly generates innovative ideas by analyzing trending repositories on GitHub and then translates those ideas into executable code with impressive speed.

It was described as innovative. They included the caution banner ("This project serves as a satirical piece") but then appears to sincerely list the features anyway.

A bot scouting for interesting projects found my bot that generates fake interesting projects and decided it was an interesting project. I could not have written a better punchline.

Dead Internet Theory

If you're not familiar, Dead Internet Theory is the idea that a growing percentage of internet traffic, content, and engagement is being generated by bots and AI systems rather than actual humans.

The original theory was a bit more "conspiracy theory"-like: shadowy actors deliberately flooding the internet to manufacture consensus and manipulate behaviour. I think the reality is simply more depressing: nobody is coordinating this. It's just the natural outcome of optimizing for engagement at scale.

  1. AI agents scout for trending human-made content
  2. AI generates derivative content based on it
  3. AI publishes and announces that content
  4. AI platforms scout that content and promote it
  5. AI agents scout that and generate more derivative content
  6. ...

At every stage, something automated is pretending to do the job of a curious human being. And because each component is optimising for some local maxima ("is this trending?", "is this novel enough?"), nobody notices the whole system is just a hall of mirrors.

The Slopinator 9000 got noticed within hours while my actual blog posts probably sit largely in silence. If I'm being honest with myself, the slop pipeline probably has better SEO than anything I've written with genuine effort.

The internet has always had spam and noise. But generating low-quality content at scale used to have more friction: human time, money, human attention. That friction is gone now, the Slopinator 9000 can spin up a new "project" in under twelve hours. A bot can scout and push it in even less.

And I'm not really sure what to think about it.