This is what came out when I prompted Canva’s AI tool to create a “view from cafe in autumn, quaint street, foliage, coffee, aesthetic, small town.” Interesting how it placed said foliage indoors. 

A rain-soaked street at dusk, pictured through the window of a coffee shop. String lights hang between old brick buildings, a church steeple in the distance. In the foreground, a candlelit table with mugs of coffee, tea, and … a corked glass jug of beige liquid? Next to a floating hunk of sourdough? And also the table is covered in water?

This is the platonic ideal of “autumn,” according to one photo that’s gone viral. At first glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a tiny street in Edinburgh or the part of Boston that looks like Gilmore Girls. But like so many other viral autumnal vibes photos this year, the image, with its nonsensical details and uncanny aura, appears to be AI-generated. 

AI “autumn vibes” imagery makes up a ton of the most popular fall photos on Pinterest right now, from a moody outdoor book display on yet another rain-soaked street to a sunlit farmers market to several instances of coffee cups perched on tousled bedspreads. All of them appear normal until you zoom in and realize the books don’t contain actual letters and the pillows are actually made of bath mat material. 

It’s not just limited to Pinterest or “vibes”: AI-generated content is now infiltrating social media in ways that have a meaningful impact on people’s lives. Knitters and crocheters hoping to craft fall sweaters are being inundated with nonsensical AI patterns and inspo images on Reddit. An entirely fake restaurant has gained 75,000 followers on Instagram by claiming to be “number one in Austin” and posting over-the-top seasonal food items like a croissant shaped like Moo Deng. Meanwhile, folks hoping to curl up with a cozy fantasy novel or a bedtime story for their kids are confronted with a library of ChatGPT-generated nonsense “written” by nonexistent authors on the Kindle bookstore, while their YouTube algorithms serve them bot-generated fall ambiance videos. Autumn, it seems, is being eaten by AI. 

Colloquially, all this garbage is widely considered “slop,” a term for the spammy AI-generated images, text, and videos that clog up internet platforms and make it more difficult and unpleasant than ever to be online. In reality, this moment of peak slop is the natural culmination of platforms that incentivize virality and engagement at all costs. 

Scammers and spammers can unleash a barrage of text and images with the click of a button, so that searches for legitimate information require even more time and effort to bypass the junk. Misinformation about crucial news events and election coverage is spreading on platforms. Academic and literary publications are being spammed with low-quality submissions, making it harder to suss out genuine work. 

“It’s harder for a journalist writing an article to break through, or an artist painting a picture, or a musician making a song when they’re competing with not just a bunch of other humans, but humans who are using this automatic creation machine to make things at a scale that is impossible otherwise,” said Jason Koebler, the co-founder of tech publication 404 Media. 

AI slop typically comes from people trying to make money by going viral on social media. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok all have programs that pay creators directly based on how much engagement their content receives, and AI makes that easier than ever.

On Facebook, AI posters say they make around $100 per 1,000 likes, and some TikTokers are making $5,000 per month. It’s especially lucrative in countries like India, Vietnam, and the Philippines, where many AI content hustlers are based. One Kenya-based creator told New York magazine that his process involves asking ChatGPT something like, “WRITE ME 10 PROMPT picture OF JESUS WHICH WILLING BRING HIGH ENGAGEMENT ON FACEBOOK” and then plugging those prompts into an image generator like Leonardo.ai and Midjourney. 

Pinterest

Meta and X seem entirely unconcerned about their platforms being overrun with low-quality engagement bait. Both Meta and X have invested heavily in AI, offering tools for users to add to the ever-increasing deluge of slop on their platforms. AI slop will continue to exist as long as people are finding ways to make money from it, just like any practice on social media. 

There’s a particular irony with AI-generated images of fall vibes, considering fall is disappearing from many parts of the US and AI emissions have become a major contributor to climate change. 

And it’s not as if the internet is starving for aesthetically pleasing fall inspo: Every September, social media is flooded with images of pumpkin-strewn stoops, cozy blankets on comfy sofas, or small towns covered in yellow and orange leaves. For the past few years, we’ve christened these mini-moments online with names: Meg Ryan fall, which had its own outfit and playlist recommendations, or Christian girl autumn, where people unleashed their inner white woman by putting on wide-brimmed hats and knee-high boots to grab pumpkin spice lattes. (This year, it seems like the Gilmores’ fictional Connecticut town of Stars Hollow is providing much of the inspiration.) 

Pinterest

It’s all very cutesy and wholesome. Part of the joy in scrolling through fall photos, after all, is knowing that these places exist and that you could theoretically visit them, that the world fundamentally changes in autumn, and that there’s only a small window of time to marvel at how beautiful it all is. 

An AI-generated image represents the precise opposite: It’s just one of the infinite possible arrangements of pixels for machines to keep churning out indefinitely. 

Abbas Fakih/AFP via Getty Images

Is Israel’s war a forever war? Despite the recent death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar — a major Israeli target since October 7 — ceasefire talks among Hamas, Israel, and Lebanese militia Hezbollah have repeatedly fallen apart. The issue? High expectations and unmeetable demands from all parties. 

The backlash against the left: The Democratic Party is significantly further to the left than it was 20 years ago, with a mostly progressive policy agenda since the Obama administration that has included protections for marriage rights for same-sex couples, advocacy for trans rights, progressive economic policies, and student-loan forgiveness. The party may now be experiencing a backlash, as voters blame more progressive policies — unfairly or not — for rising immigration, crime and inflation. 

The most important event you’ve never heard of: This week, COP16 is bringing together government officials and heads of state from around the world to figure out how to stop ecological collapse. Last time they met, in 2022, nearly every country agreed on a high-profile deal to halt biodiversity loss by 2030. So how is it going? Not well. 

A novel approach to door-knocking in Wisconsin: Hillary Clinton famously did not visit Wisconsin during the 2016 campaign, and Trump won. Now, Wisconsin Democrats are pouring time and energy into trying to change the minds of rural voters who went solidly for Donald Trump — knowing they’ll still likely not change the vote in those strongholds, but hoping to “lose by less.” It’s just one piece in a series from the Today, Explained podcast on battleground states. 

Investing 101: Trying to grow wealth can feel incredibly daunting, especially with student loan payments and inflation. One way to grow wealth is to start investing what little extra cash you have, and hanging onto smart investments to watch the gains accumulate. Here are several tips to help you start investing, from taking stock of your earnings to setting aside emergency funds to building up your long-term investments. 

Ground game misstep? The Guardian reports that irregularities have been flagged in the canvassing records for the Trump campaign in Nevada and Arizona. America PAC, which is Elon Musk’s political action committee, has taken charge of door-knocking to get out votes for the campaign, and according to data leaked by the PAC, as many as a quarter of the doors reportedly knocked in those states have been flagged as irregular, or potentially fraudulent. [The Guardian]

A stellar weekend for New York sports: The New York Liberty, the WNBA team that’s one of the longest standing teams in the league, won its first championship title on Sunday, which happens to also be New York’s first pro basketball title in more than 50 years. Meanwhile, the New York Yankees overcame Cleveland to head to the World Series for another matchup with the Los Angeles Dodgers — their 12th time battling it out. [The Week]

Getty Images Sport

That’s the remarkable difference among Black men who said they supported Barack Obama in 2012, and the number today who say they support Kamala Harris. Senior politics reporter Li Zhou looks at just what factors are contributing to Democrats’ waning support from Black men over the past decade-plus, and they range from a sense of unfulfilled economic promises to liberal policies that may rankle some of the more conservative Black voters. Read more about the three theories behind the shift here. 

Elijah Nouvelage/Washington Post/Getty Images

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Today’s edition was produced and edited by staff editor Melinda Fakuade, with contributions from senior editor Lavanya Ramanathan. We'll see you tomorrow!

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