Pot smoking makes you more susceptible to programming by the media. You smoke, snack, and zone out in front of the tube. Your altered state of mind lowers skepticism of what you are being told, so long as what you hear tends toward some form of paranoia.
I think the phrase “AI slop” is pointing at something real, but I don’t think the core problem is low quality or even inaccuracy.
It’s authorship.
What’s getting crowded out of the internet isn’t information, it’s effort. Belief. Risk. The small imperfections that signal a human actually stood behind the words and meant something by them.
AI doesn’t create lies so much as it creates inflation. You give it a thought, a hunch, a half-formed intuition, and it expands it into something clean, explanatory, and complete. And that’s impressive. But what gets lost in that expansion is the signature. The cost. The trace of a person.
You can feel it when you read it. Everything is grammatically correct, well-balanced, reasonable. And somehow interchangeable. Like it could have been written by anyone, which usually means it was written by no one.
What made the internet interesting in the first place wasn’t polish. It was compression. Slang. Assumed context. Sharp edges. People saying things a little wrong because they were trying to say something true before it slipped away.
Perfecting that kind of speech doesn’t preserve it. It erases it. When you “clean up” a person’s words too much, it becomes faintly comic, like translating street talk into a formal memo. The meaning survives, but the humanity doesn’t.
And here’s the subtle part: even when AI is acting on a person’s will, the output no longer belongs to them in any meaningful way. The will initiates the task, but it doesn’t inhabit the result. The authorship thins out. Responsibility dissolves. What’s left is content without a spine.
I don’t think this is about banning tools or moralizing technology. It’s about remembering what speech is for. Conversation is not a lecture. Posts aren’t white papers. Most of us aren’t trying to explain the world; we’re trying to meet each other in it.
If everything starts to sound like a textbook, people will stop listening. Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s weightless.
So maybe the response to “AI slop” isn’t better prompts or better filters. Maybe it’s a renewed preference for costly speech. Words that took something to say. Words that could only have been written by that person, in that moment, with that set of constraints.
I don’t need perfection. I need to know someone was actually there.
(P.S. this was AI slop)