AI Slop

AI is a powerful tool for creating things—maybe the most powerful thing we’ve ever created.

As far as an amplifier of the human mind, it’s incredible. Want to see twenty different variations of that painting before you spend the next week painting it? No problem, here you go. Got an expensive business plan you want to compare against a few others? AI can do that.

Of course, the more powerful these tools get, the easier it is to just tell them what to do and then forget about it. You come back a few seconds or minutes later, and poof, you have your answer. Exactly how that task gets done depends on how the model operates inside that black box, although you can read along and get some idea of the reasoning steps.

Still, if you can press a button and have something tedious taken care of, that’s magic. However, if you’re tempted to press a button in order to outsource something you’d normally want to do yourself, that’s AI slop.

Now, there’s use in creating a bunch of nightmare fuel like this if you’re trying to mass-market something of ill repute. In other words, online scammers love AI slop. Slop isn’t just about images, but also about programs that don’t work very well, created with minimal human effort, or writing that’s just plain bad.

There’s also cognitive atrophy, where you just turn the thinking over and then your brain eventually loses the ability to think quite so hard. The more of a particular process you surrender, the more you can get done, but how much of what’s getting done actually represents what you want to get done? How much of it is just busywork that seems impressive because it is, in fact, a TON of busywork?