AI Slop Isn’t the Same Thing as AI-Assisted Work

The phrase AI slop has caught on because people needed a name for something they were already seeing. Search results filled with vacant articles. Recipe sites that read like they were assembled from scraped sentences. Images with glossy surfaces and broken details. Product descriptions that say nothing at great length. Social posts written in the smooth, dead tone of software trying to sound agreeable. The common feature is not simply that AI was used. The common feature is that no one seems to have cared. That distinction matters. There is a difference between using a tool while doing real work and pushing machine output into the world because it is cheap. A spellchecker is a tool. A search engine is a tool. A grammar checker is a tool. A camera, a calculator, a compiler, and a thesaurus are tools. None of them remove the need for judgment. AI does not remove it either, although it can make it easier to pretend judgment happened. AI slop usually has the fingerprints of abandoned…