Americans are increasingly wary of artificial intelligence. An NBC News poll of registered voters found that 57% believe AI's risks outweigh its benefits. Among adults under 30, the skepticism runs deeper: 61% worry that more AI in society will erode people's ability to think creatively, according to Pew Research. A Quinnipiac poll showed that 74% of Americans believe the government isn't doing enough to regulate the technology.
Their concerns are justified. Goldman Sachs research reveals that AI's productivity gains amount to barely a rounding error. What the technology has actually delivered is something called "workslop",a term Harvard Business Review defines as AI-generated output that creates the appearance of productivity but requires later correction. The real product AI is churning out isn't innovation. It's garbage.
Merriam-Webster named "slop" its word of the year for 2025, defining it as low-quality digital content produced in bulk by artificial intelligence. Once you start looking for it, slop is inescapable. Spotify hosts fake bands. Amazon's catalog swells with AI-generated books. Cooking websites publish recipes that are pure hallucination. Even Google's search results have been degraded by the company's own AI overviews, which serve users tens of millions of wrong answers per hour, according to one study.
This flood of cheap synthetic content poses a genuine threat. Anyone working in creative or cognitive labor,journalists, musicians, designers, educators,now competes in a landscape flooded with low-effort imitations of human work. AI companies trained their models on human-created material, extracted enormous value, and now use that same technology to undercut the original creators.
A straightforward tax could address this imbalance. Lawmakers should implement a 1% annual levy on companies that provide or host generative AI content. For the five largest publicly traded AI firms,Nvidia, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Meta,which collectively hold $18 trillion in market value, this represents a negligible cost. The revenue would flow into a public fund that distributes grants to artists, cultural institutions, researchers, and the infrastructure that supports human creativity: local newspapers, radio stations, publishers, educational programs.
This approach differs from other AI-related policy proposals that have gained traction on the left. Bernie Sanders has advocated for a pause on AI development, a position rooted in fears of superintelligent machines that belongs in science fiction, not legislation. Universal basic income, another frequently discussed option, is too broad and misses the real problem. AI probably won't eliminate all employment, and subsidizing consumers won't address the underlying devaluation of creative work.
The slop tax is precise because the problem is precise. Unlike previous technological disruptions that created new tools humans could leverage, AI slop's primary function is to replace human creativity with something cheaper and faster. Democratic institutions,schools, newspapers, museums,exist to nurture human flourishing, not to be optimized away.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has already invoked the New Deal as a framework for reimagining the social contract around AI. A slop tax would be its logical extension: requiring the companies profiting from the strip-mining of human-generated training data to reinvest in the cultural ecosystem they've disrupted.
Author James Rodriguez: "A small tax on the worst excesses of the AI industry could actually fund a cultural renaissance instead of watching human creativity get buried under an avalanche of junk."
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