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Created December 9, 2025 10:40
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LinkedIn Post - 2025-12-09 05:40
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call-me-an-ai-slop-peddler-im-not-offended-in-a-world-where-billions-scroll-w.md

Call me an AI slop peddler. I’m not offended. In a world where billions scroll with hungry thumbs, of course machines are cooking the cafeteria stew. Some of it fills you up. Some of it makes you sick. 🥣

Quick reality check: “AI slop” means low-effort, mass-produced content made to farm clicks or rank, not to help. It’s a behavior, not a tool. AI isn’t the villain - spray-and-pray is.

My research bot pulled receipts so I don’t talk out of my beer. Snopes and Wikipedia lay out the term cleanly. NewsGuard has tracked over 2,000 AI “news” sites by 2025. Google’s March 2024 update went after scaled content abuse - think endless auto-pages designed to game search. TikTok and Meta now label realistic AI media. The numbers move, but the trend is obvious.

The good: AI is a blender for curious people. It translates, summarizes, captions, and personalizes at a pace humans can’t touch. It lets a solo creator remix formats that used to need a team. It makes alt-text and plain-language versions fast, so more people can actually use the internet.

The bad: noise. Feeds clog. Attention gets wasted. Ad systems pay content farms pennies at scale while burying work that took weeks. Platforms play whack-a-mole - labels help, detection lags, and enforcement is patchy.

The ugly: self-poisoning. If the open web fills with synthetic leftovers, future models trained on it get dull and samey. Nature wrote this up in 2024 - train on your own exhaust and you drift into mush. Add the obvious scams and fake local “news,” and trust takes a hit.

Here’s the boring truth: we’ve survived spam wars before. Knight Institute says don’t panic - people and platforms adapt. But adaptation isn’t an excuse to flood the room.

How I avoid being actual slop:

  • I add something only I can add - a tiny experiment, a firsthand example, a weird angle - and I link sources.
  • I disclose meaningful AI use. AI is my intern, not my ghost.
  • I publish for usefulness, not volume. No scaled junk to tickle a ranking.
  • I keep a clean research corpus so I don’t train tomorrow on today’s mistakes.
  • If I use synthetic media, I keep provenance - content credentials are basically “who made this” baked in.

So yeah, I blend. I test. I learn. But I also source, verify, and credit. If it isn’t helpful or new, it doesn’t ship. 🗑️

Your turn - what’s your one-sentence “why this exists” test before you hit publish?

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