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.
And it needs to stop.
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 garbage!!
Yeah. It is. So here's the thing. I'm not here to join in the chorus of AI SUCKS. Because I honestly think it's amazing. But if you're entering a few words into a chat field and get back something you copy and paste and pass off as your own work?
In that case it is you, my friend, who sucks.
Lazy half-assed thoughts put into a machine that can make them sound profound on the surface, but lack any real point of view, suck. Headlines that are a generated rehashing of actual good human thoughts? No surprise, they suck. AI outputs what it predicts you want straight from the median of approximately a metric shit-ton of training data. It’s not creating. Which means people who are using it as a ghostwriter also aren’t creating, they're generating.
What's even worse is that when humans stop creating, only generating and re-generating along the median, the audience is also unlearning important skills. 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.
Which means when everyone is using the same tools to do the same work, you're going to get the same muddy bullshit back, not anything that actually does what you're trying to do. Instead, people are increasingly clocking the robot author behind the work, and they feel cheated. Like they busted someone selling them a fake Gucci. They point and laugh and call it slop, and turn away.
But. All of this is a very good thing for creativity. With people rejecting the generative low bar, it makes originality a premium benefit. It gives us a chance to use AI to support our own weird work. 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 write as well as a real human writer who’s taken years to write, rewrite, learn, fail, be inspired not just effective.
It's on a human for doing a very human thing: trying to find a shortcut and profit off of it.
Also the takeaway here isn’t to stop using 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 taking creative direction from AI. Nor are they taking AI generated content and calling it theirs.
Only you can prevent AI slop.