On Slop
Someone commented on one of my videos: "This is AI slop."
That comment stuck with me. Not because I think they're right—I don't—but because I've been thinking about what "slop" actually means. And I don't think it means what most people think it means.
"Slop" was Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2025. The official definition: "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence."
Notice the key words: low quality and in quantity. Not "made with AI." The definition itself acknowledges the distinction most people miss: AI is present in slop, but AI isn't what makes it slop.
What makes it slop is the absence of taste.
John Gruber gave a talk at Macworld 2009 called "The Auteur Theory of Design." His core argument was simple: the quality of any collaborative creative work tends toward the taste level of whoever has final cut.
If the decision-maker has great taste, the output rises toward that level—even if the people executing have less. If the decision-maker has poor taste, talented people below won't save it. Quality flows from the top.
"Just simply making decisions, one after another, can be a form of art."
I think about that line a lot. Because that's what I do with this project. I make decisions. What topics to cover. What style the narration should have. When to approve an image or reject it. How the script should open. Whether a particular line sounds formulaic. What patterns to break.
AI assists at every step. But how it assists—that's my decision. I have final cut.
This argument isn't new. Every tool that makes creation easier gets attacked.
In 1859, Baudelaire called photography "art's most mortal enemy." A group of French intellectuals formed the League of Artists Against Photography. They thought the camera would destroy imagination—that art required manual labor to be art.
In 1982, the British Musicians' Union tried to ban synthesizers. Rock culture dismissed synth players as nerds; Ozzy Osbourne kept his keyboardists hidden offstage so the band wouldn't be tainted with "synth cooties." Today, the synthesizer is considered as fundamental to modern music as the human voice.
When Photoshop emerged, digital artists were accused of "cheating." The undo button, the layers, the ability to mix media—traditional artists said it wasn't real art. Some still say it.
The pattern is always the same: fear, then dismissal, then ubiquity. The tools change. The anxiety stays constant.
But here's what's worth acknowledging: sometimes the critics have a point.
AI can produce slop. It's actually very good at it. Give a language model a prompt and you'll get fluent, confident, generic output. The words flow. The structure makes sense. And it's utterly forgettable. Pattern-matching without a soul.
That's slop. Generic output with no one behind it making decisions.
The difference between slop and craft isn't whether AI was involved. It's whether someone with taste was in control. Someone who rejected the obvious choices. Someone who noticed when things got formulaic and changed direction. Someone who cared enough to iterate.
I built a system that analyzes my own scripts for patterns: vocabulary overuse, opening formulas, transition cliches. It tells me when 100% of my cold opens use the same structure. It flags when the phrase "think about that" appears too often. Then it proposes changes to break those patterns.
Why would I build that? Because I'm trying not to make slop.
Working with AI has actually made me appreciate human artists more, not less. AI shows you what pattern-matching looks like—the mold, the expected move, the safe choice. It reveals what's generic.
Human creativity is about breaking patterns deliberately. The meaningful departure from expectation. The choice that surprises.
AI can't do that on its own. It needs someone with taste telling it when to deviate.
Some AI content is absolutely slop. Lazy, generic, soulless stuff flooding every platform. I hate it as much as anyone.
But the presence of AI isn't what makes it slop. The absence of someone with taste making decisions—that's what makes it slop.
I have opinions about what I'm making. I iterate until it feels right. I notice when things get formulaic and I change them. I have final cut.
That's not slop. That's craft with new tools.