Have y’all heard the term “slop” as applied to Internet fare? Hastily-made, usually crappy content (often AI-assisted) meant to make a few bucks or get some click clout. (Simon Willison has some thoughts on the definition.)

I wanted to see if there was a connection between popular Wikipedia topics and produced slop so I knocked a tool together and called it Slopline; it checks Wikipedia by date for trending pages and checks YouTube by same date to see if the topics have been slopified into short, AI-heavy video.

Slopline is basically a mashup of the YouTube searches I’ve been playing with this week and a tool I made earlier this year called Wikipedia Hot Topics. Wikipedia Hot Topics takes one of Wikipedia’s “Top 1000” daily lists, analyzes it to find the pages with the biggest view jumps, and provides information on them, pointers to potentially-useful date-structured Google News searches, and even keyword-based RSS feeds if you want to track those page topics outside Wikipedia. (If you’d like to try Wikipedia Hot Topics yourself, it’s available, free and ad-free, at the Wikipedia tool site WikiTwister.)

I took that functionality and connected its output to the query part of my YouTube search. In addition, I created a date span of the Wikipedia date search plus 7 days and added that to YouTube’s date search. So Slopline works like this: choose a day and the number of pages out of the top 1000 you want to review. Slopline generates a list of viral topics for that day. Choose one and Slopline will send that topic and a 7-day date span to YouTube for searching and return any discovered slop.

Not every popular topic gets the slop treatment. Sometimes I found news stories in response to a topic and if a famous person passed away there lots of tributes, clips of their appearances, etc., which isn’t necessarily slop.

But sometimes — like when Joe Martin the Hollywood orangutan got mentioned on Reddit in November — I found a bevy of short videos, using AI-generated voices (or in one case an aggressive piano soundtrack) along with stock content and what appear to be AI-generated visuals.

This doesn’t work well enough for me to fine it up into a tool but it has gotten me interested in something that searches YouTube via Wikipedia, possibly with contextual date options. Maybe I can learn enough to make a slop filter.

I think I need to note that the name Slopline came from a song by the pop artist emlyn called “Plot Line“; it’s a catchy song which is why I kept muttering to myself while coding: “good for the good for the SLOP LINE…”