Everyone’s freaking out about “AI slop,” all this AI-generated content flooding the internet. But here’s the thing: there’s no such thing as AI slop. There’s only human slop.
Think about it. AI doesn’t just generate content and post itself to the internet. A human has to prompt it. A human has to look at what it generates. A human has to decide “yeah, this is good enough” and hit publish. The slop is coming from inside the house.
But honestly? Even that misses the bigger point. Because humans have been creating endless streams of garbage content long before AI showed up.
And why wouldn’t we? Our brains are literally wired to take the path of least resistance. Cognitive ease is the default setting. We’re energy-conserving machines. Why spend an hour crafting something thoughtful when you can spend thirty seconds on a hot take that gets the same engagement? Our brains don’t want to do the hard work of original thinking when pattern-matching and recycling what already works is right there.
Look around. Half of social media is people posting the same recycled opinions for the thousandth time. The same “clever” comments designed to get likes. We’re stuck in this dopamine loop where that little hit of validation from engagement keeps us churning out the same low-effort takes. Someone spends thirty seconds typing something out, their brain just pattern-matching what gets rewarded. Blogs exist only to make sure a post went up today because of some sunk cost fallacy: “I’ve posted every day for six months, I can’t stop now.”
What exactly isn’t slop at this point? We’re drowning in useless media that we’ve been tricked into creating. It’s operant conditioning at scale. The platforms trained us. Give us variable rewards for posting, and we’ll keep pulling that lever. Everyone’s a content creator now, which really just means everyone’s a rat in a Skinner box, pumping out material that barely qualifies as entertainment.
Here’s what really gets me though: we spent years talking about democratizing content creation. Making it easier for everyone to participate. Breaking down barriers. Giving everyone a voice. But the second tools show up that actually do that, that actually make it easy for anyone to create content, suddenly everyone who was already doing it starts complaining. “That’s not real writing.” “That’s not real art.” “These people didn’t pay their dues.”
It’s gatekeeping dressed up as quality control. The people who learned to use Photoshop or spent years blogging or whatever want to pull the ladder up behind them. They liked democratization as a concept, but they didn’t actually want democracy. They wanted their turf protected.
AI is just a scapegoat. A convenient excuse to blame for the awful content that was always there. The difference now is that more people can make it. That’s it. That’s the whole problem everyone’s actually mad about. The internet was already full of garbage: listicles, clickbait, engagement farming, recycled takes. But when it was our garbage, when it took at least a little bit of human effort to churn out, we convinced ourselves it had value.
Now AI makes it easier, faster, and suddenly we can see it for what it always was: lazy, thoughtless content optimization. We’re not mad about the quality dropping. We’re mad that the barrier to entry dropped. We’re mad that the game we were playing, pretending our low-effort content was somehow better because a human technically made it, got exposed.
The laziness was always there. The slop was always ours. AI just scaled it up and made it impossible to ignore. We finally have something else to blame, so we’re taking it. But the call is coming from inside the house. It always was.