What is Slop

We live in an era where our focus is in the digital world, the cost of generative models is dropping, and AI adoption is finally increasing. As a result, people are creating more websites, software tools, creative media, and all sorts of different online assets.

In particular, when it comes to AI generated outputs, people have been quick to label them as "slop" or "AI slop". The Dead Internet Theory is a concept where the majority of the Internet will be overtaken by bots, algorithms, and AI-generated content, replacing the genuine, organic human interactions. Cloudflare's traffic radar even shows that roughly 58% of today's traffic is from bots as opposed to humans.

Startups like Parallel AI and Browserbase acknowledge this trend and are building the "web for agents". Similarly, Firecrawl is making it easier for AI to scrape from websites by restructuring data.

So I ask myself: is something worthy of the "slop" title just because it was created with the help of AI?

I think not. I believe slop is defined as outputs produced with the absence of human judgement.

Simply giving a human an AI tool does not automatically make them a slop cannon. For instance, in my previous professional role as a software engineer, I was using Claude Code to help build trading tools for my portfolio manager with a $2B fund. I wasn't simply delegating and spouting ideas to the agent; there was a lot of thoughtful design to the way I set up the infrastructure in order to decrease latency, as an example.

I think the reason "slop" is so commonly associated with AI is because being uncritical and using AI tools typically go hand in hand. After witnessing the impressive intelligence from a model like Opus 4.8, people may logically come to believe "this model knows way more than me about everything, so I will take everything it says as truth".

This is exactly the moment it gets problematic: outsourcing our cognitive thinking, and allowing the agent to run free without much input from us.

Anthropic performed a study among software engineers that showed "AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery. On a quiz that covered concepts they’d used just a few minutes before, participants in the AI group scored 17% lower than those who coded by hand".

While there is absolutely no argument that these LLMs are (substantially) smarter than us, I also think we as humans often forget or undermine our own unique taste that we have developed over the course of our lives. Just because we now have access to these powerful tools does not mean we throw out all of our critical thinking.

I have never been an excellent writer, and in high school I even took all of my English courses over the summer to try and boost my grades. However, these days I make a conscious effort to write opinionated pieces like this one (without AI!) to exercise my critical thinking abilities. I believe being able to communicate your ideas in a thoughtful way is the antithesis of "AI slop".

inspired by conversation with Fawzi