I am weirdly tired of the phrase “AI Slop.” Not because AI is so great and does everything wonderful. Not at all. The problem is blaming a tool for the output a person has signed their name to. I prefer “slop created with AI” because the problem is not the AI.

Did we ever blame Google for a poorly written article? I never remember once my term papers being labeled “Compton Encyclopedia slop” (Yeah, we had Compton’s, not Britannica, not sure why, but probably was cost. We didn’t really reach middle class until late in my high school days.)

Nope, prior to AI being able to basically write for us, we never once blamed the tool. We blamed the person who signed their name to the output. You know, the person who took the input from sources, dubious or otherwise, copied it down, and presented it as “theirs.” Sometimes it was just that we may have copied sections of these sources because we were lazy, and it was really hard to find plagiarism at the time.

It is somewhat telling of my years editing that I can now spell plagiarism without any sort of spelling assistance.

A visual example

Paint. Microsoft Paint. This tool has been around forever and has been used to create many pieces of “art”. I quote art because almost all of the “art” it creates is not completely attractive. In fact, like AI before it, it was blamed for most bad images drawn on a computer. “That looks like it was edited in Microsoft Paint” was not at all the high praise a tool with so many users has actually employed in their lives.

Here is a very small example of what I might do with a blank canvas and Paint. I mean, it isn’t the worst thing ever since I was drawing with a mouse, but still.

Is that the tool’s fault that I draw like a 3rd grader? No. And I strongly resisted trying to let an AI program generate a picture for me.

I am not suggesting that Paint makes it easy or anything, but I will note that it can be employed to great effect. If you don’t believe me, check out this Instagram account.

Is that slop? Not at all. It isn’t as photo-realistic as one can get in a better editing tool, but many of the pictures on that post alone are quite beautiful.

Blame the user, not the tool

For better or worse, AI is going to continue to be used. Sometimes poorly, sometimes well. Ignoring for now that there certainly are AI tools that are less ethical than we want them to be, AI is going to be used in many ways for the foreseeable future.

All I ask is that we give ownership of the slop to the slopper. Instead of “AI slop” call it “Sloppy slop that was slopped by a sloppy slopper, that probably just used AI”. Hopefully, if you have read this, I am desensitizing you to the word “slop.”

The blame needs to go to the person who said:

“AI, write me a post about some topic that I can pass along as my own work that will make me look smart even though I can barely read you and I have no way of knowing if it is vaguely correct so I can look cool on the socials”.

Or something shorter because that seems a bit more specific and far less self-deprecating than the slop originator probably used. Hey, they might have even specified a topic (though to be fair, it does seem like we get waves of the same topics on LinkedIn in my feed.