Let’s talk about slop. The internet’s favorite new insult for bland, soulless AI-generated content. The kind that reads like a potato wrote it while half asleep in a Word document. But before we get too smug about our human superiority, let’s take a step back and remember: humans have been making slop long before the robots joined the party. Ever read a 2000 word recipe blog that starts with “When I was six, my grandmother’s neighbor’s dog loved apples”? That’s not gourmet writing, that’s content casserole, baked with a sprinkle of SEO and served lukewarm on a Wix site.
AI slop is easy to spot, it’s the LinkedIn post that says, “In today’s fast-paced digital world, synergy is key,” or the product description that sounds like it was written by a sentient thesaurus on Ambien. But human slop? Oh, it’s everywhere. We’ve got Facebook rants that start as opinions and end as therapy sessions, corporate PowerPoints with 86 bullet points and zero points, and dating app bios that read like rejected AI drafts (“Work hard, play harder, love my dog, let’s vibe”). If AI is a content factory, humans are artisanal slopsmiths, crafting chaos one keystroke at a time.
So before we roast the robots for their beige prose and motivational sludge, maybe we should look in the mirror. AI slop is just a reflection of us — our habits, our shortcuts, our love of filler and fluff. We trained the machine on human nonsense, and now we’re shocked it’s fluent in nonsense too. The truth is, whether it’s a human or a bot, most of the internet is an all-you-can-eat buffet of creative leftovers. The only difference? AI slop is faster. Ours just has more feelings about it.