Each communicative medium has its own type of slop. Hallmark movies are slop for feel-good holiday entertainment; junk mail is slop for postal advertising. “AI slop” is actually “algorithmic slop” that happens to be AI generated. The algorithm, rather than a generative model, is the communicative medium, and we already had algorithmic slop through... See more

People make things when the value of the thing exceeds the cost of creation. When the cost of creation in a medium is high, people are careful only to use it for high-value products. If a movie costs tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to make, you can’t afford to make a bad movie (or at least, not very many of them). You’re going to put a lot... See more

Slop is the newly popular term for the garbage you see in tweets, LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos, and websites more broadly that is so superficial, mediocre, and banal that the only reason people could possibly create it is to drive some metric they’re optimizing for: likes, views, clicks, whatever. Making slop has only gotten easier with AI, but... See more