AI Slop Is About the User, Not the Technology
And other things nobody wants to say out loud
→ This is a story about a word, a values war, and losing the plot.
TL;DR
AI slop has a specific definition, and I think we’ve wildly overextended it. More specifically, when we use a term about a precise content problem to discuss values, the more nuanced conversation gets overlooked. This is my attempt to have it (or at least think my way through it).
A few things have been collecting dust in the back of my mind that have finally congealed, or converged, in a meaningful way:
Merriam-Webster named “AI slop” its 2025 Word of the Year. Official definition: “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”
A Canva presentation I sat through on the state of marketing and AI in 2026 referenced AI slop as a defining term across industries and culture at large.
An app I use regularly just greeted me with a full-screen declaration — “Nothing in this app is made with AI” — followed by a bulleted list of reasons why AI is essentially the enemy.
Three separate moments. Same cultural anxiety. I feel like I’ve seen this show before. In fact, I’ve been watching technology cycles play out long enough to know that when something gets this loud, it’s worth slowing down and asking why. (Translation: I’ve been ruminating on this idea for a bit.)
Let’s Actually Define the Thing
Before I go further, I want to be clear about what I’m talking about here: AI slop. Because it has a specific definition:
Low quality content produced at volume.
Two conditions. Both have to be true simultaneously. Careless and industrial scale.
I’m talking Jesus memes, cats slapping things, fruit falling in love, and talking dogs (my favorite is @hellococodoodle). Also AI slop: the keyword-stuffed blog posts that read like they were written by a robot. Content that was produced quickly, carelessly, and in bulk — with no human intention, judgment, or craft behind it.
On the flip side, what AI slop is not is the energy crisis, the sentient machine, the job apocalypse, or the end of human creativity. Those are real conversations worth having, but they’re not this one. AI slop is 100% a content problem. A specific, fixable, human-made content problem. And, IMHO, conflating it with everything else we’re worried about is exactly how we lose the plot.
So Why Is Everything Getting the Same Label?
Naming what we hate about a technology is actually a sign of maturity. It means we’ve moved past the hype, developed some experience, and started to form an opinion. That’s not nothing. But there’s a meaningful difference between discernment and a blunt instrument, and right now we’re wielding the term AI slop as a very blunt instrument.
That app splash screen I mentioned earlier honestly stopped me cold. It started with a commitment to stay AI-free. A creator taking a stand about where they draw the line. Great. I get it. Then I read the bulleted list below the headline: environmental cost, stolen work, gender-based violence, and bad astrology. All claiming AI is the enemy. The concerns are real, but that list wasn’t nuanced. It was a bumper sticker.
My POV: we’ve been living inside AI-powered systems for over a decade. Google’s search results. Spotify’s recommendations. Netflix’s what-to-watch-next. Your bank flagging a suspicious charge before you noticed it. Technology running in the background making choices for us. We called it “the algorithm”. A polite, non-threatening word for the same underlying family of technology. We might have complained about it, but nobody declared themselves algorithm-free.
What’s actually happened is that we took a precise term — AI slop, a specific content problem — and turned it into a values war.
And in a moment when we are extraordinarily good at finding things to judge each other about, AI handed us a fresh one.
We’ve Been Here Before
This isn’t the first time a technology arrived and the culture responded by drawing a moral line.
When photography emerged in the 19th century, painters declared it the death of art. What actually happened? Photography liberated painting. Impressionism, abstraction, and modern art followed. Not because technology replaced creativity, but because it expanded what creativity could do.
When television entered American living rooms in the 1950s, critics warned it would rot your brain, destroy family values, and turn an entire generation into passive, unintelligent viewers. Congress held hearings. The Surgeon General commissioned studies. And it didn’t destroy culture. It became culture.
The pattern is consistent. When a technology threatened to change how creative content was made or consumed, the culture declared a moral emergency. It never stopped the technology. It just gave people something to fight about while the people who wanted to figure it out got to work.
AI Slop is a Real Thing
I’ll be honest. My first experiences with AI weren’t good.
Like a lot of people, I started with tools someone else had built: software layered on top of an LLM, promising to help me research faster, write better, do more. What I got out was roughly what I put in. Which, at the time, wasn’t much. I didn’t know what I was doing. The outputs were generic, the references were sometimes fabricated, and I worked harder to fix what the tool produced than I would have just doing it myself.
I got slop. A lot of it.
There’s an old computing principle I always come back to: GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out. The quality of what comes out is almost entirely a function of the quality of what goes in.
I understand the concept. I just hadn’t applied it to my work with AI yet.
So I got curious. I stopped using tools someone else had pre-configured and started learning how the layer underneath actually worked. What it means to give an LLM real input versus vague instruction. How to train a model on your own voice and methodology instead of hoping it guesses right. It was slow. It was unglamorous. There was no moment where it suddenly clicked, just a gradual accumulation of better inputs producing better outputs.
The more I learned, the better it got. Not because AI improved, but because I got better at working with it.
AI Slop is about the User
Nobody really wants to say this out loud: AI slop isn’t a technology problem. It’s a user problem.
AI is generating low quality content at volume because people are generating low quality inputs at volume. The expectations are high, the effort is low, and the gap between the two is what’s filling our feeds. That’s not an indictment of the technology. That’s an indictment of the person behind it. It is about the user, not the tool.
And I get it. The promise of AI was ease. Do more, faster, with less. That’s a compelling pitch, especially for founders and operators who are already stretched thin. But ease and intention aren’t the same thing. A tool that amplifies human input will amplify whatever you give it. Bring clarity, curiosity, and craft and you get something worth reading. Bring a vague prompt and low expectations and you get slop. Every time.
The good news is that it’s fixable. But fixing it is also a personal choice. People can choose to use AI or avoid it altogether. They can make and distribute slop or use it more thoughtfully. What I’d push back on is the finger wagging.
Declaring yourself AI-free doesn’t make your work better.
And assuming everyone using AI is morally decrepit isn’t discernment. It’s just a different kind of lazy.
A quick pause before we go further. If you’re new here: I include a Purpose Play in most of my posts. You can think of it as a moment to take the idea off the page and hold it up against your own work.
Purpose Play
Next time you are online and encounter some slop that makes you grimace, pause for a second and get curious:
Are you noticing the content because the quality is genuinely low?
Are you discounting the content, or the person behind it, because you think it’s AI generated?
Does it actually matter to you either way?
Merriam-Webster didn’t name AI slop the word of the year because AI is failing as a technology. They named it because we’re all paying attention and talking about it. And paying attention, really paying attention, not just declaring a moral position, is actually the most useful thing anyone can do right now.
The photographers didn’t kill painting. Television didn’t rot our brains. And AI isn’t the end of good content.
AI slop is simply what happens when a powerful tool meets a low-effort input. That’s a human problem, which means it has a human solution.
So, I ask you: what is it about AI you don’t like? Is it the tools? The way people are using them? The corporations behind the technology? A specific ripple effect? What about capitalistic greed? (This last one is a favorite of mine. It’s at the root of most things I dislike.)
Get clear on your why. Because conflating AI slop with everything else doesn’t equal discernment. It just makes the conversation louder and more confusing.
Or don’t. That’s fine too.
Just maybe hold off on the finger wagging.
About the Work
I’m Amy Zwagerman—brand strategist, fractional CMO, and founder of The Launch Box. I work with founders and marketing leaders to translate durable marketing principles into strategies and systems that fit their specific context, stage, and goals.
Marketing Jam sits alongside my client work as a place to explore ideas more openly. If the thinking here resonates and you’re curious about working together, you can learn more about my services or get in touch here.
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