Dear Friends and Comrades,

If you spend any time on social media, you’ve seen the uncannily rendered videos and memes known colloquially as AI slop, crudely generated videos playing on stereotypes meant to generate viral outrage. In our upcoming summer issue of Middle East Report, Nermin Elsherif looks at the consumption and production of these kitschy and provocative images and videos in the Arab world. 

In “Arab AI Slop and the Precarious Politics of Digital Kitsch,” which we’re sharing today, Elsherif examines the circulation of slop that features Arab leaders—among them Egyptian President Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi and Syria’s former President Bashar al-Asad. These attention-grabbing reels, which the piece describes in vivid detail, rely on exaggerated demonstrations of masculinity and nationalism and often include humiliating depictions of US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Elsherif suggests they offer a kind of antidote to the live-streamed genocide in Gaza and regional wars that have dominated the feeds of Arab publics over the last few years. 

Digging deeper, the article also offers a window into who is producing these videos. Especially in Egypt, a cottage industry of content creators have pinned their economic hopes on the AI slop economy. Offering some early insight into a newly developing and precarious labor sector, Elsherif tells us, “Producing AI slop is not completely effortless. An experienced user can generate a ten-second reel in around five minutes, but creators relying on free accounts are limited to only a handful of experiments each day… They become trapped on these platforms as both workers producing content and consumers seeking tools and instruction.” 

This article is the second preview we’re sharing from our upcoming issue, Art at Work. We hope you find this piece, and last week’s interview with Hamidreza Pejman on the art scene in Tehran during wartime, enlightening. As always, you can let us know what you think by responding to this email. We are grateful to have the support of our readers. 

In solidarity, 

James Ryan
Executive Director

Arab AI Slop and the Precarious Politics of Digital Kitsch

By Nermin Elsherif

In April 2026, a 15-second Instagram reel depicting US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as janitors cleaning a dirty men’s room went viral. Netanyahu says in broken Egyptian Arabic: “Clean the toilet properly, you Trump boy, before the Protector of Egypt, President Sisi comes [sic].” President Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi then appears in a well-fitted suit, shouting, “Why isn’t the toilet clean, you dogs?” He hits Trump in the face, sending him and Netanyahu to the ground crying. A few weeks later, the same creator, bilozz1, uploaded a second version with an almost identical script that achieved less virality, in which Trump and Netanyahu are cleaning dishes in a kitchen, trying to finish their job faster to avoid Sisi’s retaliation. Days later, the creator published a third version set in a fictional Egyptian alley, with Trump and Netanyahu both dressed as street cleaners. Sisi has longer lines: “You guys are completely useless. You don’t get anything done; you’re good for nothing.” The camera moves to a lower angle, depicting Sisi as a towering figure while the two other politicians on the ground respond: “We apologize to you, savior of Egypt. Forgive us!” He kicks them in the face.

These reels exemplify a peculiar form of what is loosely referred to as AI slop: cheaply produced, AI-generated content designed for rapid circulation. Over the past year, many sub-genres of AI slop have appeared and disappeared: from “Italian Brainrot” to anthropomorphized cats to the talking vegetables and fruits who get married, cheat and fight over custody of their children in simplistic, sensationalist and misogynistic plots. Some of this slop takes the form of political commentary, used by everyone from the president of the United States to dispersed networks of gig workers on the fringes of the internet.

Despite their hyperrealist rendering, these videos have a tacky aesthetic. Their voice-over occasionally breaks, and the lip-sync glitches as the AI voice fails to articulate convincing accents. The stories often play on raw, heightened emotions of fear, anger and regret. Yet, on the Arabic-speaking internet amid Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and the subsequent US and Israeli-led regional war, a specific unnamed political subgenre has emerged, particularly in Egypt and Syria. It is centered around recycling conservative gendered stereotypes in absurdist forms that play on humiliating Western leaders while exaggerating local nationalist masculinity and sovereignty. These spectacles appear in the social media feeds of users exhausted from doomscrolling their way through reels of human suffering in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.

This new cultural form of short AI-generated videos does not sit neatly within the categories of propaganda or satire. They center banality rather than offer a political argument. Their length is optimized to engage the largest number of viewers, and successful plots are turned into reproducible formulas with the hope that the next version will garner even more attention. These reels become the smallest atomic unit of the internet; they slide into users’ direct messages as trivia and appear in their stories, only to be quickly forgotten. Their comment sections are loaded with memes, emojis and mentions, but rarely any substantial conversation. Despite their intriguing aesthetics, Arab AI political slop cannot be understood through their representations alone. The visualization and circulation of these political fantasies is emerging at the intersection of authoritarian rule, platform capitalism and the rapid diffusion of generative AI tools during a period of genocidal violence in Palestine and broader regional war.