AI Slop Through a Psycholinguistic Lens [ LingMon #234 ]

📅 16/03/2026 | 🗣 Anna Marklová (FF UK) | 📝 AI Slop Through a Psycholinguistic Lens 🔖 ABOUT THE LECTURE ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ ▸When studying the outputs of large language models, researchers can focus on various aspects — underlying generative processes, emergent phenomena, the influence of prompting strategies, and so on. One key choice is whether to direct attention toward the upper limits of what these systems can produce, or toward their most typical, default outputs. In this talk, I focus on the latter: AI slop. I argue that studying the features of — and attitudes toward — AI slop matters precisely because it is this kind of output that floods our online spaces, from unusable AI-generated knitting patterns on Pinterest to the growing wave of AI-written papers that overwhelm scientific journals. I will present two lines of research: one on AI poetry generated by minimal prompts, and one on AI-generated images and the extent to which they reflect human-specific visual asymmetries. 📽️ ABOUT THE SERIES ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ ▸The history of Linguistic Mondays dates back to the 1980s and their original aim was to make both the students and the faculty members as well as the wider research community aware of the field of computational linguistics in general and of the results achieved by the members of our team in particular. During the years, with the growing awareness of the domain and with new trends appearing on the scene and with more master and doctoral students coming in, the scope of the topics introduced has broadened correspondingly, covering all aspects of the field from the basics of computational linguistics, its linguistic and formal background through corpora case studies and natural language processing applications such as machine translation and information retrieval up to the most modern trends including machine learning. It is also offers an excellent opportunity for PhD students to present their results and to receive a relevant response from leading experts in the field. ❔ SOCIAL MEDIA ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔ ▸web: https://ufal.mff.cuni.cz ▸LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ufal-cu ▸BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/ufal.mff.cuni.cz