The poisoned well paradox. When digital garbage reinforces the hunger for truth

We live in an era of strange paradoxes. The internet is flooded with content that researchers call ‘AI slop’ – meaningless, valueless, inauthentic digital waste generated en masse by artificial intelligence. Merriam-Webster named “slop” as the word of the year for 2025, which in itself is a commentary on the state of our information environment. And yet, contrary to intuition and apocalyptic visions, something unexpected is happening in the audience’s collective consciousness.

When a well is poisoned, water from a clean spring becomes invaluable.

Researchers from the Centre for Economic Policy Research conducted a fascinating experiment in collaboration with one of Germany’s most respected editorial offices (https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/ai-misinformation-and-value-trusted-news) . They showed readers how easy it was for AI to generate fake content that looked plausible and then observed how the readers behaved. The results surprised pessimists: awareness of the threat did not distract people from information; quite the opposite – it strengthened their attachment to trusted sources. Readers returned to the newspaper’s website more often and stayed subscribed for longer.

How is this possible? Perhaps the answer lies in the nature of the human mind. When we are inundated with zombie football and cat soap operas, and nine of the top 100 YouTube channels are AI-generated, our defence mechanisms kick in. We don’t want more – we want better.

This leads to a surprising conclusion: in an attention economy, where everything seems to be deteriorating, trust becomes the rarest commodity. Henry Ajder, an expert in the field, compared AI slop to the smog of the Industrial Revolution – a pollution that cannot be completely avoided. However, smog did not stop people from breathing. It made them appreciate clean air.

So, can we breathe a sigh of relief? Not necessarily. This paradox only works when there are institutions capable of building and maintaining trust, such as newsrooms that invest in verification and journalists who ask questions. A flood of poor-quality content may reinforce the value of truth, but it cannot create it out of nothing. Truth requires effort, time, and human evaluation.

This post is part of the project “People and Algorithms in Organisations: Competences to Work in the Digital Environment” (DIGIT_People and algorithms), funded by the NAWA – Narodowa Agencja Wymiany Akademickiej (Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange).

#DIGIT_NAWA #competencies #marketing #AI