Embracing the slop

None of us are writing code by hand and the skills and tools now available to design app layouts, marketing sites, featured images mean that most of us are letting the agents handle that too.

But what about writing?

After I published a teardown of how I’d grow Every one of the first replies was to label it as AI slop.

I recently made the decision to not engage on X and just use it as a publishing outlet for my content elsewhere and this reply, along with the 99% of spam replies is a big reason why.

My initial response was to reply and point out that their site also showed that their content was written by AI and at least I had disclosed on the blog that it was written by AI.

I thought it deserved a bit more thought and explanation in my own words with nuance that you don’t really get on social media.

I presume their tool was built using AI agents to research, design, and code this tool. Does that make it slop? Or is AI simply a tool the operator used to which they provided direction, feedback, testing and improvements?

I hate writing content, just as I hate manually writing code. What I am looking for is the output, the result, reaching an audience who I know the content or software will help in some way.

I have done this for many years before AI and agents had the ability to research and write and fact check with programmatic SEO. In those days using templates and data and conditional logic and even spintax to get unique content.

Is it slop? Is it spam? These questions don’t concern me and in my experience of doing this for many years the answer to both is “no”.

The question I ask is “Does this help my audience to achieve {x}?”

I think that a human-in-the-loop using AI to create content is a valid use case to do that. Just as it is for building software, games, or design.

The vast majority of my sites are fully designed, coded, and written by AI with me as the architect and product manager. They never rarely get hit by algorithm updates and reach 500,000+ unique visitors a month.

Correlation != Causation and this is just my own experience but human-led AI content is here and it’s thriving.

I don’t think you should use AI on social media for engagement though. The reply guy stuff is one (of many) reasons I no longer spend time on X.

Using AI for creating posts is more of a grey area. I called out Noah Kagan for this and I maintain that you generally get far more reach on social media if you don’t use it.

That said, it all depends on your goals and I have been using my agents to post these blog posts for me on X. I don’t really care about getting big reach and being on X is a net-negative for my mental health because of the sheer amount of FOMO and feeling like everyone else has it more figured out than you.

I guess it all comes down to your definition of slop. To me AI slop is content made with AI and published (often at massive scale) without anyone reading it properly and no care or attention to what it actually says.

That’s not what I do. So I embrace the “slop”.