Jason Koebler

Jason Koebler is an American technology journalist who co-founded 404 Media in 2023 with three former colleagues from Motherboard, Vice’s technology desk, where he had been editor-in-chief. The outlet is journalist-owned and subscriber-funded, and Koebler is consistently one of the most-cited reporters on Techmeme’s leaderboard of influential technology writers.

Reporting on the slop economy

Much of Koebler’s recent work documents how generative AI is flooding the web with low-effort, machine-made content — “AI slop” — engineered not to inform readers but to game the recommendation and search algorithms that decide what billions of people see. In a widely shared 2025 piece he argued that the true audience for slop is the machines, not humans, and that the resulting deluge amounts to a brute-force attack on the algorithms that increasingly mediate reality.

404 Media has repeatedly been the first to surface concrete harms: AI-generated books in public library catalogs, plagiarism farms that launder real reporting through AI spinners, and non-consensual deepfakes. Koebler’s critique is grounded in on-the-record reporting rather than abstraction, which is why his findings are frequently cited even by people who dispute the broader alarm.