Gen AI is not the only source of slop
Sometimes it’s fully human-made, and just as useless.
People are sloppy too
There’s one type of AI slop we aren’t really talking about. It’s not the crappy videos of Trump playing soccer in the oval office, or clips of rabbits jumping on a trampoline, or the emoji-bulleted, soulless, copy/paste jobs all over LinkedIn. It’s something a little more subtle, but is equally a big waste of my time on text-based scrolling platforms.
I’m talking about AI “opinion” pieces that are devoid of actual opinions.
Here are some examples (without naming names):
Tutorials on how to tell if someone is writing with AI.
Reposts of AI articles without any analysis.
“Hot takes” on AI that are designed as rage or click bait rather than discourse.
Late-to-the-game opinions that read like regurgitation of what other people have been saying for months.
Stop it people — please?
I imagine if I were to go back through my LinkedIn posts I could find examples of where I too have been guilty of this. The FOMO speed-to-market pace of AI tools we saw earlier this year often felt like it necessitated lightning speed content creation to just keep up and stay relevant. So please, if you want to call me out, that’s fine. I’ve beaten you to the punch.
Why this is a problem
We are living inside a significant cultural shift — history in the making. I both love and hate this for us. I love that we have a chance to be a part of it and to shape it in a way that could, if done well, make our lives better. I hate that there is just so much crap out there that we are going to miss the signal through the nose. There’s often too much going on for us to find a discourse, shape real ideals, and think about what we want the future to look like as AI tools improve and become more prevalent. That’s the space I want to be in, and I want others to join me there. Otherwise we lose control of the narrative and can’t continue to critique, iterate, protect, and develop a future that has real potential.
So what do we do?
If you want to create content about AI, please keep doing it. All I ask is this:
Have a perspective.
Pause, think, and develop a real opinion. Share it. Engage with others around it. Let it be fluid — mutable — as you learn more and mature your views. Don’t troll or argue. Pose questions. Be curious. Advocate for others through critique and perhaps even (gasp) read some perspectives that don’t align with your own. Stay current. Be constructive. Tag people whose perspectives you value, and get their opinion on it. Figure out what it means to not only exist inside of history, but to be a part of shaping it.
Yes, this will take longer. You may have to spend some time deciding what your perspective really is. You may not be able to use generative AI to create the content. You may have to write it yourself. You may have to work on some new prompts to help you make sense of what’s in your brain. It will take more work, but the work will be worth it. I promise.
Let’s stop creating slop we need to wade through, and build a flow that actually helps us get where we want to go.
