AI垃圾 AI lā jī
What Chinese calls the flood of machine-made filler.
The short answer
CasualCurrent slangChecked November 2026
AI垃圾 is Chinese for “AI slop”: text, images, and videos mass-produced by AI tools, uploaded by the ton, and wanted by no one. The acronym stays Latin and the noun does the work — say it “AI lājī”, with garbage doing exactly what you expect.
In a chat
- 亮亮 Liangliang
你看这个视频，猫在弹钢琴！
Look at this video, a cat playing the piano!
- 灯灯 Dengdeng
这只猫有六条腿……又是AI垃圾。
This cat has six legs… More AI slop.
- 亮亮 Liangliang
现在网上到处都是AI垃圾。
The internet is full of AI slop now.
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How to reply
我已经分不清了。
I can't tell what's real anymore.
When not to use it
What it means
The word does not aim at AI in general — plenty of people in China use the tools happily. It aims at the output nobody asked for: recipe posts with glue in the instructions, photo albums of impossibly large shrimp, e-books clearly assembled in an afternoon. If content were food, this is what gets swept into the bin — hence garbage, 垃圾, the same word that turns mail into spam in 垃圾邮件.
Variants narrow the scope. AI废文, “AI filler writing”, is for text. AI泔水, “AI swill”, is the stronger pour, closer to the barnyard image inside the English slop. Most posts just write AI垃圾 and move on.
How people use it
The diagnosis usually arrives through the nose: AI味, “the AI smell”. A post with impeccable structure, stock transitions, and no actual information is said to have 一股AI味 — a distinct waft of AI. The smell test is now a running joke: if it reeks, someone in the comments will say so.
When the problem is confidence rather than blandness, Chinese borrows another calque: AI幻觉, “AI hallucination”, for answers invented out of thin air. Bland filler is garbage; confident nonsense is a hallucination. Both words are safe in a news article and normal in a group chat.
Where it comes from
English moved first: slop, an old word for pig swill, was revived for AI filler and then picked as Merriam-Webster's word of the year for 2025. Chinese uses a plainer word for the same thing: AI垃圾, “AI garbage”.
The garbage framing had slots waiting for it. Chinese internet vocabulary has called low-value mail, sites, and posts 垃圾 for decades, so the new compound fit an old pattern. The earlier complaint 内容农场, “content farm”, named the human version of the same hustle; the AI only scaled it up.
In use
2 examples现在网上一半的图片都是AI垃圾，评论区都在吐槽。
Half the pictures online these days are AI slop — the comment section does nothing but complain.
这篇文章一股AI味，八成是AI写的。
This article reeks of AI — odds are a bot wrote it.
The characters
Explore individuallyIndividual character meanings do not always explain the meaning of the whole word.
Sources
This guide is original Dengdeng editorial content, offered under CC BY-SA 4.0. The linked dictionary entries adapt CC-CEDICT under the same license.