We have decided, collectively and without any vote I was privy to, that AI-generated content is slop.
Fine. Some of it is.
The unspoken companion to that judgement seems to be that anything created by a human is the epitome of enlightened moral reflection and the embodiment of the creative spirit.
It is not though, is it?
The "Agree?" posts. The broetry. The hustle fables contaminating Instagram and Twitter like raw sewage, where a CEO interviews a candidate by asking them to wash his car, the candidate does it, the candidate is now the CEO, the former CEO is crying, and everyone in the airport applauds.
The carousel of seven leadership lessons from a toddler's birthday party. The screenshot of a screenshot of a tweet from 2019.
Human beings made all of that. On purpose. With thought, and mostly sober.
And we tolerated it. We still tolerate it. It gets likes. It gets reach. Nobody comments "ignore all previous instructions" underneath it because there were no instructions. There was just a person, a keyboard, and an absence of shame.
Meanwhile, use one em dash in a thoughtful paragraph and you are put on trial for being a robot.
The Garbage Was Already Here
So here is a question. If the problem with AI content were quality, would we not have burned the internet down years ago?
Quality has never been the bar. The bar has been lying on the floor since about 2012, and we have been limbo dancing under it ever since.
The problem is not quality. The problem is cost or, more precisely, that cost is what our greed-centric, capitalism-trained minds have mistaken for worth.
For all of human history, producing words, music or art has cost something. Time, effort, attention or, at minimum, the calories required to type, learn an instrument or draw a picture.
That cost was never just overhead. It was the signal.
If someone wrote you three paragraphs, they had spent something on you. The garbage was forgivable because it was expensive garbage. Hand-crafted. Artisanal. Free-range, locally sourced garbage, lovingly assembled by a real human who could have been doing something else.
Effort has always been our proxy for sincerity. We do not actually evaluate content. We evaluate what it cost the sender to produce, then infer care from the price tag.
AI Broke the Price Tag
That, I suspect, is the basis of this postmodern, post-technological crisis.
A model can now produce three competent paragraphs for a fraction of a penny, and suddenly we cannot tell whether anyone spent anything on us at all. The words might be better than the human version. Frequently they are. It does not matter. The signal is gone, and we experience the missing signal as an insult.
This is why the reaction to AI content is disgust rather than critique. Nobody says, "This AI post has a weak argument in paragraph two." They say "slop" and move on.
Disgust is what humans deploy when a social contract has been violated, not when an argument is unsound.
And this, I think, is the actual adoption problem. Not the one in the vendor decks.
The industry keeps treating AI adoption as an on-ramp problem. Better tooling. Better training. Better change management. Champions programmes. Lunch and learns. If we just make the motorway smooth enough, everyone will merge.
People are not refusing to merge because the ramp is bumpy. They are refusing because AI attacks something older than any technology: our method for deciding what deserves attention.
We price contributions by what they cost to make, not by what they are worth to receive. Every workplace runs on this. The long email signals seriousness. The thick deck signals rigour. The all-nighter signals commitment. None of these measures value. All of them measure effort.
Effort was the only currency we all agreed on.
AI decouples effort from output, and we have not invented a replacement currency yet.
That is not a training gap. It is a hole in the social operating system. You cannot lunch-and-learn your way out of it.
What Replaces Effort?
The organisations that adapt first will not be the ones with the best Copilot licences. They will be the ones that learn to value output on its merits, with provenance and accountability attached, rather than sniffing it for traces of human suffering.
That means knowing where a piece of work came from, what checked it, and who stands behind it. Judgement about the work, not forensics about the typing.
Until then, we will carry on as we are. Applauding hand-crafted garbage because a human bled for it, and sneering at competent prose because a machine did not.
We will be leafing through endless self-help books, skipping the Icelandic folk-techno-jazz quartet's new three-hour experimental album, and staring at someone's blurred photograph of an old woman drinking from a plastic cup at a fish market in Thailand with a mixture of confusion and boredom.
To borrow from Julian Lennon, we are so enchanted by how clever we are that we have not noticed.
The slop predates AI. AI just made it impossible to pretend effort was the same thing as value.