Only YOU can prevent AI slop.
Have you seen what a shitty writer AI is?
It can't write a good headline, its points are always very kind of middle of the road takes and it overuses words like clarity and impact, and overuses phrases like "it's not just this, it's really also that". Don't even get me started on the emoji usage when I prompt it to write a social post. And it's everywhere! Half of the stuff on Reddit is written by ChatGPT, so many blog posts, LinkedIn thought pieces… AI slop is absolutely everywhere and I hate it.
Oh wait. Sorry. I meant to say "Have you seen what shitty writers humans are these days"? People think they can put a few words into an LLM and out pops a ready-to-publish piece of brilliance that they created.
AI slop is really just human slop.
So we can stop it.
Agency management loves AI. They think they can just type in what they want and boom: Here’s your campaign concept, no questions asked. Need another revision? Ok, here it is. Change the headline? Done. All within seconds, and with no pesky pushback on the assignment, the feedback or another round of changes. And all way under budget.
Content creators love AI, because now they can be experts on things that they only just heard about yesterday, churning out long explanations on how this latest change changes everything. The world is drowning in thought pieces and short form video.
But hold on – is that an em dash? Wait a second, this writing pattern feels familiar. Hold up, I think… yeah. This was written by AI! It’s slop!
And a lot of times it is, because when you don’t have an expert in the lead you’re going to get boring repetitive crap with no soul.
As creatives, our job has always been about getting an idea across. A feeling. Showing how things connect to make someone’s day a little better. Their week a little easier, their day to day a little more fun. And it’s always been about curation as well. What to take into your idea, and what to leave out. How to make that come across the very best, incorporating feedback, rewriting, reworking until it’s exactly what you want.
Working with AI is the same thing. You’re generating words, thoughts, images that support your idea, and you’re building as you go, taking some generative thoughts into your setup, rejecting headline suggestions but maybe finding one word that sparks a new idea that lands perfectly for you. Finding images to show mood, or shoot concepts. instead of going through scrap. Maybe even being plesantly surprised by a glitch or artifact that moves you into an area you hadn’t thought about.
BUT. If you’re just tossing in some half assed “look at thie brief and give me a whatever” sort of thing, then it’s going to be this pasty AI goo that people are rejecting. Obviously, because that isn’t just a bad way to work with AI, it’s a bad way to work in general.
In that case it is you, my friend, who sucks.
By putting the robot in the lead, you’re going to get a bunch of crap. Lazy half-assed thoughts put into a machine that can make them sound profound on the surface, but lack any real point of view. Headlines that are a generated rehashing of actual good human thoughts. But now it’s mushed down into the median of a metric shit-ton of training data. This isn’t creating, it’s simply generating. And there is a big difference.
Another thing that happens when humans stop creating, only generating and re-generating along the median, it encourages the audience to pay less attention. Instead of recognising creativity and originality, they are getting swamped with mediocrity and begin to accept half-baked as the real cake. That’s not an environment where original thinking gets recognised, let alone rewarded.
So when people are actually clocking the robot author behind the work, they can feel cheated. Like they busted someone selling them a fake Gucci. They point and laugh and call it slop, and turn away.
Which is a very good thing for creativity. And brands that care enough to go that extra human mile.
With people rejecting the generative low bar, it makes originality a premium benefit. It gives clients, management, people holding the bag a reason to champion creativity. To make sure that we have actual humans writing work for human audiences, using their real life experiences to create thoughts that resonate. That move people, and that evoke real emotions. Not generative echoes of a synthesised feeling.
But let’s be real about where the problem is. It’s not on AI’s inability to do the job. It’s on a human for doing a very human thing: trying to find a shortcut and profit off of it.
This also doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use AI. I mean, come on, you’re reading this on Robot is Friend, so I’m guessing you figured this wasn’t going to land there. I use AI in my writing, concepts, designs myself… but I’m showing up with an idea, a point of view and ready to curate, to rework and to reiterate.
Because AI is only as good as the human creative using it. And a good creative isn’t ever taking creative direction from AI. Nor are they taking AI generated content and calling it theirs.