#RANDOMTHOUGHTS: Surrendering to AI slop, and the end of human creativity, not!

I am not a good writer. I learned to do better, though, after years of practice.

So it pains and frustrates me to learn how AI slop is taking over writing, one of God’s gifts to humankind. I call it lazy when we let machines take over this creative exercise called thinking.

Don’t get me wrong. I use AI to summarize articles and read through long reports to extract the main points. It helps me cut down the time it takes to read through thousands of sentences. That is what AI is for: finding patterns and organizing them to help me think better. However, to surrender your writing to AI- that’s where I draw the line.

This New Yorker article states:

By the fall of 2024, machines were writing around half of such articles, according to the digital-marketing agency Graphite, which, far from taking umbrage at the usurpers, recommends using AI to help run your ad campaigns. And why not? In one blind test, people found A.I.-generated advertisements to be “of higher quality” than ads made by humans.

I am in an industry where AI-generated writing, including articles and copy, is becoming a preferred practice. You want to rank highly in search engines and large language models like ChatGPT or Google Gemini? Generate AI articles. That will answer your need for voluminous content. (That’s AI slop for me.) You want to do more on social? Use AI to create more material. AI saves the day. Optimizing content is becoming synonymous with making it findable and readable by AI.

New Yorker article explains:

And that’s not counting social media or e-mail or all the robot-written rubbish that comes your way by text or voice mail or pop-up customer-service chats. YouTube is overrun with slop. Reddit is caked in it. Much of Facebook is nothing but slop.

It’s not surprising that many of us are seduced by the efficiency and the lightning speed of AI when it comes to writing. A few prompts can produce good enough haiku. A better, well-thought-out prompt can produce poetry or fan fiction. Don’t look any further: I can churn out book and movie reviews by the dozens using LLMs. As for social media, Facebook, IG, and other networks offer AI features for writing. Even Substack lets you generate an AI image with a few prompts.

One of my writer colleagues describes AI writing as “soulless.” It is easy to spot it: AI writes in almost perfect English, and it defaults to using BIG words. It will often recommend sentences with complete thoughts. It abhors unorthodox writing, such as ending sentences with prepositions. LLMs are built that way: data fed into them is TOO PERFECT; nuances are opposed. Nuances in writing are what make us human. Imperfections. Little mistakes. Rough edges. Blots on paper. Smudges. Erasures. Edits.

That’s what editors are for. They are the writer’s frenemy. They make sure your grammar is correct, but they keep your voice intact—and yet consistent to a set style and tone. Your voice is what makes your writing human. Unique. Not slop. Nor sloppy.

Forbes recently wrote that companies like YouTube/Google are concerned about the exponential explosion of AI slop.

AI-generated content has proliferated across the Internet at an unprecedented rate, raising concerns about content quality and the reliability of search results. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan claims that cleaning up AI slop is one of YouTube’s biggest initiatives in 2026, and he’s not the only one.

I asked this question several times: Will AI-generated articles or slop affect the reliability of search results? Logic dictates it will. If you keep feeding the machine more garbage, what kind of output will it produce eventually? This makes me hopeful because AI slop will churn out lame, generic, soulless content. We’ve seen this happen in music over the years. Every hit sounds the same as the last one. Thanks to AI slop.

Here are more details on the effects of AI slop on tech companies that built AI.

Simply put, AI slop will render LLMs useless.

Here’s an interesting discovery. A headline declared, “Companies Are Using Reddit to Manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI Search.” That headline is not AI-generated, but it sounds like one from Buzzfeed, partly meant to hook you into reading more. I digress.

Technologies or innovations like AI will have their good and bad uses. In the prior headline, companies are using machines to trick machines to boost their chances of winning the war for attention, discoverability, and making money. Fortunately, someone caught them with their hands in the cookie jar. Bad!

The moderators of the biohacking subreddit say that peptide and hormone replacement therapy companies have been surreptitiously spamming Reddit in an attempt to get their posts scraped by AI chatbots. The strategy is an effort to systematically manipulate the answers provided by chatbots by manipulating the underlying source material that those chatbots will scrape—in this case, a popular Reddit community.

AI slop is much like spamming. It’s a shotgun approach to achieving whatever objective you want, as one or two targets will be hit. It’s like throwing everything on the wall, hoping one or two ideas would stick. It’s the wrong approach, albeit with the right intention.

Why do we call AI slop soulless writing? What does soul mean? In music, particularly the Blues, soulful means music that comes from the heart. There’s a unique feel to it. Raw. Unadulterated. Authentic. Apply that to writing.

Soulful writing is authentic. It shines a light on the writer’s experiences. In fiction, it puts a spotlight on imagination. Fantasy. Magic. Make-believe worlds wouldn’t have happened if not for imagination, which comes from that grey matter that we’re endowed with.

AI, when it was first “imagined,” was meant to simulate human intelligence. Simulate, not replace. And it says artificial — not real. Now, we treat AI as if it’s our second or third brain. History will dictate that AI, just like the Internet, will dominate much of our waking life. But it will not replace thinking, save for writing, which is thinking in words and in language.

Large Language Models are called that because they use human language to break human intelligence into mathematical equations. They use human language to simulate human intelligence in machines created by human imagination and mathematics.

So I am hopeful that we do not surrender our basic human endowment to AI. AI is another human invention that will be better used for some menial tasks; don’t let it touch your writing and thinking.

Note: I wrote everything that you just read with a few grammatical and sentence fixes recommended by Grammarly.