How AI turbocharged Donald Trump's 'slopaganda' machine

There is a word that is circulating among American media experts: “slopaganda.” It's not a typo, but a combination of "slop" — that is, stuff thrown out there carelessly — and "propaganda." Here's the surprise: artificial intelligence is not only used to perfect lies, but to produce so many of them, so quickly, that reality can no longer keep up. Modern disinformation is thought to be a quality problem — overly realistic deepfakes, manipulated videos that fool even experts. But the real revolution, which Trump is riding on Truth Social, is in quantity: a flood of false images, memes, and fabricated photos generated by AI, not to convince, but to overwhelm. The result? Attention is shattered, and people stop seeking the truth because they give up. Instead of creating a perfect lie, the strategy is to overwhelm everyone with an avalanche of "slop" — crude, often implausible, but unstoppable stuff. Donald Trump, former president and the main player in this machine, has understood that the strength of AI is not in deceiving the most attentive, but in making it impossible to distinguish what matters from what is just noise. A consultant on his team puts it clearly: “We no longer have to win every argument. It's enough that no one can follow one anymore." And while his opponents try to disprove every single false image, the avalanche continues. A concrete example? During the spring, his profile on Truth Social spread dozens of AI images in which Trump appears embraced by huge crowds, or surrounded by police officers in tears. None of these scenes ever really happened, but the point is not to convince: it is to create saturation. And here comes the disturbing detail — most users who see those images don't even wonder anymore if they are authentic. The flow simply anesthetizes them. According to analysts, it's like being in a room where a hundred different songs are playing all at once: after five minutes, you no longer hear anything. But there is one aspect that often escapes notice: this strategy no longer aims to convince, but to wear people down. Trump's real weapon is not the sophisticated lie, but the quantity. We grew up thinking that disinformation was a matter of "well-crafted" fake news. Today, the stakes are different: whoever controls the volume of the noise controls the conversation. The phrase to remember? There is no longer any need to win the battle of truth; it is enough to bury it under a mountain of noise. If this story has changed your perspective, you can mark it on Lara Notes with I'm In — choose whether it's an interest, an experience, or a belief. And if you happen to tell someone how the saturation of false images has changed politics, on Lara Notes you can tag the conversation with Shared Offline: this way, traces of the ideas that really matter remain. This Note comes from the Financial Times and saves you several minutes of in-depth reading.