Stop the slop

How to actively fight against AI-generated slop that's taking over the internet.

We’re at a crossroads and you have to decide which direction you want to go in.

In one direction is the tempting technological path where we rely on AI for almost everything in our lives. Want to write a blog post? Click this button. Need help with crafting that awkward email? Press here. Can’t be bothered reading that long proposal? Summarise now.

The siren song of AI is so alluring because it removes all friction. Everything that used to be hard and require critical thinking, like writing and decision making, can be outsourced at the simple push of a button.

But what happens when we willingly hand all our thinking to a robot that has gobbled up everything ever written (without any compensation to those who created it), just so it can be vomited back to us for a low monthly fee?

Do not confuse me for a luddite. AI is a revolutionary tool, and I use it almost daily as a researcher that can search the internet better and faster than me. As write and think deeply about the topics in my upcoming book on conflict in the workplace, it’s invaluable in finding research studies, people to interview and case studies.

But - and here’s the line I’ve personally drawn - I refuse to use it for most of the messy, hard, complicated parts of content creation as I combine words next to each other on a page.

The reason is that writing is more than two words placed together. The act of writing is the ability to grab hold of thoughts and beat them into shape over time. I need the mental space to collate, and rearrange, and think through different arguments in real time as my brain types out each letter. Outsourcing that to ChatGPT is outsourcing our ability to be human.

I’m not alone here. In the last few months, several writers I admire have all grappled with this crossroads. Derek Thomson calls it “the end of thinking”, James Marriott links it to “the dawn of the post-literate society”, and NYMag says that “everyone is cheating their way through college.”.

Read any of those stories and you’ll come to the same depressing conclusion. If handing our brains over to AI so it can craft all our communications is one path to go down, then I’m defiantly choosing the road less travelled, the one filled with thinking, deleting, mistakes and rewrites.

I gave some advice recently in my weekly column in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and for this month’s One Useful Thing I’m expanding it out into a simple framework on how to think about AI and creativity.

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One Useful Thing: How to stop the slop

There’s a certain word that’s now starting to regularly appear after the letters “AI”. It first appeared in Google searches in 2024, and it’s risen exponentially since then. Last month it even entered the Cambridge English Dictionary.

The word? “Slop”, with the full official term - “AI slop″⁣ - describing the endless stream of low-quality content that artificial intelligence is enabling anyone to create at the click of a button.

You’re likely to see versions of lazy AI slop appear everywhere, from vomiting out buzzwords in lengthy reports at work, to crafting robotic-sounding prose on emails and social media.

When it comes to using AI for anything creative, I like to think about the entire process of creation, from the beginning to the middle and the end. You can also apply this same framework to any project that you’re working on. I believe AI can be most useful at either end, but not for the entire thing.

If we break any creative process down into three stages, then this what it looks like:

For the creative process, using AI at the beginning and the end is when it’s most useful:

Beginning: AI can be particularly useful for initial ideation, research and preliminary concept development. It can help to generate ideas, gather information, research, give you questions and provide starting prompts for creative work.

If you consider what it pumps out at the start as the final output, then congrats you’ve just created slop. Please do not use the first words that AI provides. While it might look tempting, it’s just an amalgamation of letters on a page and should be viewed as a very early draft.

Let me give you an example. I keep lots of notes for topics to write about every week in my column. As I shared recently in “How to write a book”, I use a simple but powerful notes system that really works for me.

Occasionally I’ll ask AI to come up with additional ideas for topics I could potentially write about and expand for my column. When I do, about 19/20 of its suggestions are just downright bad. Sure, they might work for some generic version of it, and I could easily write columns off the back of them, but most of them are just, well, not good.

However within this mountain of mediocrity, there is usually about 1 out of 20 that has the germ of a good idea inside it that I can actually use.

The problem is if you use any of the first 19 without any critical thinking, you’re going to create slop. You need to know recognise the good ideas in the sea of shit, and this is part of the creative process.

Middle: This is where we need you. Yes, you and your beautiful mind, with all of its contradictions and imperfections. The middle part is where human creativity, intuition and artistic judgment are essential. These are all the parts that AI can’t do, like emotional depth, cultural context, personal experience and authentic artistic expression. AI tries to do this and fails every time.

Human writing carries the weight of lived experience in ways that algorithms simply cannot replicate. When a person writes about heartbreak, you can feel the specific ache they’re trying to articulate. When they describe a sunset, it’s not just a collection of sensory details – it’s filtered through their unique perspective, their memories, their particular way of seeing the world. AI might know that sunsets are “beautiful” and “golden,” but it has never stood on a beach watching the day end, feeling small and grateful and melancholy all at once. That difference shows up in every sentence, whether we consciously notice it or not.

Ugh, that entire paragraph in italics above was written by AI.

Re-read it again.

I asked it to write a paragraph for this newsletter post and it immediately started writing about ‘describing a sunset’. The more cliched-sounding something it, the more likely it was drafted by a robot using the average of everything that has ever been written about this topic.

Real writing has life to it, and rhythm that alternates between long snaking sentences that weave and dance and play around. Then short ones. That punch you. In the stomach. Over and over.

This part is the messy, human middle. It’s where the joy and frustration and experimentation is and I encourage you to never leave this part out of your creative process. There is no problem with using AI for some of your process, but you need to maintain the friction to create great content.

End: Once you’ve got your creative project into a good place, AI can be valuable for final production tasks, like refinement, editing, formatting and spell-checking. It’s actually excellent at making sure whatever you create is high-quality from a technical point of view (but don’t get me started on the em dashes).

You can run any creative project through AI once it’s complete, but remember these two things:

1. AI is a liar. It makes up facts and announces them so confidently you believe it. Always double check what is tells you.

2. AI is a sycophant. It will always tell you that you’re amazing. Don’t believe it.

We’re at a creative crossroads and these are two of the multiple paths you can choose to go down. You can go all-in on AI to create everything for you at the single click of a button, or you can keep one eye open and use AI as a way of augmenting, not replacing, your creativity.

Which path do you want to take?

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I’m writing this from Istanbul, our base for the next few weeks. The rare combination of Europe and Asia makes this one of the most fascinating cities on Earth, and we’re slowly eating our way all around it.

I am currently deep into writing my new book. Next month I’ll share some of the early ideas for it, but I can confidently say it’s the most interesting topic I’ve ever written about. I’ve found a new angle through it, and can’t wait to share more details.

Lastly, we have an excellent cohort of people signed up for 12 moths of mentoring with me for This Year. This is your final reminder that applications will close at midnight AEST this Tuesday September 30, and then won’t open again for another year. I’m so pumped to kick it off.

Until next time, yours in usefulness.

Tim