Andy Polaine
Recently, I’ve found myself switching off as soon as I get a whiff of an LLM in a message or post. These days, it’s difficult to know for sure, because people have started to copy the style in their own posts.
In this way I think of AI slop as a double polluter. It pollutes the environment through excessive resource consumption and it pollutes the cultural landscape with slop. LinkedIn is the prime example of an increasingly enslopified commons.
The Anthropic adverts skewering ChatGPT did a wonderful job of demonstrating the icky feeling of being on the receiving end of AI slop output.
Plenty of people, like Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, contest that AI makes them more productive by summarising emails and meetings. They also use AI to help them write emails and LinkedIn posts. But I know of nobody who says, “I really enjoy reading AI-written content.”
A similar lopsided marketplace problem also plagued the sharing economy in the early 2000s. Most people like the idea of borrowing, very few like to share. Supply can’t match demand and they fail. I hope so.
When this contaminates services it is really problematic. A recent blunder from ME Bank in Australia sent homeowners a note telling them the Reserve Bank of Australia was putting up its interest rates and that they were “pleased to announce that we are passing on this rate increase in full on your variable home loan(s).“
Each one of these feels like a tiny act of thoughtlessness, of not engaging with the human, of not caring. The only way to be personal is to be personal. It’s something that we humans as social creatures are finely attuned to.
Seth Godin made an insightful point recently that helped it all click into place for me:
It’s not slop because it was created by an AI. It’s slop because it’s slop.
It’s not the technology. It’s the intent.
This post originally appeared in my Doctor’s Note newsletter. You can subscribe here.