We love a villain. They bring moralistic simplicity to the universe. Complicated is bad. Predictable’s more comforting. As such, it’s not surprising that our hatred of “slop” has found its villain – AI. But this is entirely too simple an answer to our slop problem, writes Jazz Twemlow, creative lead at Paper Moose.
While AI has definitely made us more acutely aware of, and annoyed by, slop, Paper Moose’s senior creative copywriter (and philosopher in chief) Jazz Twemlow argues it hasn’t caused it and is just another, more obvious example in a long line of sloppifying developments wreaking havoc on our slop-prone squish brains. Slopped yet? Slop on.
The allure of dross at scale has always been our psychological failing that technology has exploited. If we want to fight slop, it doesn’t help to reduce its definition to “crappy videos”. It’s better understood as the metastatic result of systems that tempt us to mint content without requiring a single reason for it to exist.
The technological culprits remain the same: zero friction for output coupled with space. Limitless space. Faced with an apocalypse and a finite ark on which to stuff our most prized possessions, suddenly you’re forced to evaluate whether artefacts have a right to take up that space. The Mona Lisa would obviously make it on board; a video gallery of all those AI re-imaginings of movie characters doing the scene from Dirty Dancing, less so.
Mostly because they’re shit. And you know they’re shit. But measured against the infinite space of Instagram, what harm are they doing? This isn’t really an AI problem: it’s a problem of no longer having a framework against which to decide whether or not something has a right to exist, coupled with, as is often the case, a near-frictionless experience in creating it. It’s a digital tragedy of the commons, where each rational actor degrades the shared resource. Not out of any individual moral failing, but because the cost of polluting a common space is perceived as zero.
Go back to the early days of the internet, and you’ll find sloppification. WordPress sites that could never be filled and zero publishing friction gave us blogs with spurious takes on geopolitical events with scant research or expertise: Opinion Slop. Our phones with gigabytes of space and inbuilt camera, once coupled with Instagram’s infinite storage saw the currency of a photograph completely depreciate, giving us photos of breakfasts, selfies of wherever you happened to be for some reason, and out of focus sunsets. Photo slop.
Over on Twitter (now known as ‘That app I deleted’) I remember in its very early days when a friend tweeted a pretty naff joke. I DMed with words to the effect of, “Are you sure that one’s worth sharing?” I thought I was being the good friend pointing out spinach in the teeth.
The response was a verbal shrug and “Think I’ll leave it up. It doesn’t matter.” And they were right. This wasn’t a five minute set where every joke had to count. This was infinity. Volume without value was no longer a problem, but rather the whole strategy behind a numbers game where, as long as one tweet occasionally sky rockets, the rest don’t matter.
What were the stakes anyway? Zero effort to write, zero effort to publish, still the same amount of space left to fill afterwards. It’s not like you were only allowed one tweet a week. There is also no visible social signal that standards have dropped. No “dislike” or “Oh FFS” button, no collective groan, no editor walking back to your desk with a polite no. So everyone keeps posting, assuming they are the only one who has noticed the decline.
The same logic scales up. In a web 2.0 era of constant news-making, where pseudo events find fertile ground, you could argue that the frequent and overlong speeches and churned out spectacles make Donald Trump perfect for the slop era: an endless carousel of staged executive order signings and provocative statements drained of quality or deliberation, cynically deployed to be gawped at by the doom scroll generation. In a news cycle that laps him up for a minute before moving on to the next thing, nothing he does ever runs the risk of meaning anything for very long. President slop.
Slop, therefore, is a mindset and a shift in how we communicate and consume, not a technological output. It can’t be reduced to the uncanny valley, low quality video output of brands trying to cut corners, but rather the wholesale paradigm that sees content chaff created in frictionless, spaceless contexts at speeds that disincentivise careful deliberation, and an array of like buttons and emojis that can only ever offer positive reinforcement.
If you’re not convinced, just think of any process once riddled with constraints that’s now near-instant and spaceless and ask yourself whether it’s become more… sloppy?
“Letters to the editor” for example. In the old days, if you had strong opinions about a piece of journalism, you’d handwrite a letter and have to walk to a letter box to send it. That’s after paying for a stamp. It’s unlikely, in such circumstances, that you’d bother forking out your own money and time to send “The author is a total cuck” to The Times. Even if you did send your Cuck response, the limited print space means your frail, straggling comment would get thinned from the herd, like a newborn wildebeest with two broken legs drenched in lion gravy.
These constraints add cognitive disfluency, bumping you out of System 1 impulsivity and forcing deliberation. Is this worth it? Will it get up? Is it good enough to fight off competitors in taking up what limited space there is? All that added friction forced you to question whether you felt that strongly about your strong opinion at all.
Friction, then, is slop’s foe. Like the sweet tooth, our dopaminergic systems are a dangerous evolutionary vestige, a hangover where the quick hit of quickly discardable slop appeals more than the slow reward of genuine craft. If we’re not careful, things will only continue to get sloppier. As with shifting baseline syndrome, each new generation accepts as the norm the degraded state of the (digital) environment they grow up with. In other words, if you think you can spot slop now, count yourself lucky.
This is not to say all AI use is slop, or that it will not produce truly exceptional work. The best will still be the best, and AI may help us get there faster. But while AI might raise the ceiling, it has certainly exploded the floor. For brands, that proliferation of frictionless adequacy is a real danger as it drags the average down. Anything above “slop” will seem like craft. With our baseline shifted this could, in turn, leave brands prone to being “amazed” by – or worse, asking for – work that would once have been considered rather naff.
The good news is we can unslop our online spaces and our expectations. Just as with smartphones where we’re slowly reclaiming autonomy over hijacked primitive instincts by adding friction (time limits so that the currency of phone use becomes focused on value, rather than wasted doomscrolling; monochrome colour schemes; passwords to get into apps to force real deliberation about whether you wanted to check the app in the first place), the same weaknesses that leave us prone to slop can be reversed to immunise us against it.
If slop comes from the removal of creative friction, add it back. Sure you can prompt something into existence, and because it’ll look like a “finished thing”, that might process as “good”, but is it worth it? Even if you suck at drawing, try pencil sketching a draft of the concept first.
If you can’t be bothered seeing it through, that nag of doubt and resistance to effort may be a sign that you were mistaking speed for craft, you don’t love the idea that much, and it therefore deserves to be killed off.
If AI generates a script for you, write it out, word for word, and if you find yourself wanting to pull out your fingernails, again, it may be a sign the idea isn’t exciting you that much. The insertion of these more effortful moments forces us out of the System 1 emotional thrill of seeing a piece of creative so quickly completed and brings us back into a space of intentional consideration.
Imagine scarcity. Yes, you can AI into existence 15 visual executions. But forget that. Imagine each one as if it could be the only one released. Make the best kill off the other 14, and then elevate one of those until they’re killing off the others instead. Just inhabiting the mental space of hypothetical scarcity and limitation might make you look at and assess the work differently. And this is for both creatives before selling in ideas to brands, and for brands/clients who are increasingly tempted to rattle off their own ideas and present them to agencies as “What we’re after”: you only stand to get better work by letting a bit of friction back.
Create cooling-off periods. With AI especially, it’s easy for an idea to get out the door in minutes before you’ve really had time to reflect on it. Tackle some other jobs. Come back to it. Go for a walk. Just don’t send stuff off or let it auto-slip into a pitch deck just because it has the deceptive polish of a fully-fledged execution. A great idea scribbled in pencil 5 years ago won’t look anywhere near as good as a finished AI scamp today, but which idea is better?
What’s difficult about all of this, is that emerging (web) technology feels like an external tool, yet the impacts are deeply psychological, meaning that making new tools and platforms work for us in a way that hones – rather than erodes – craft requires as much introspection and mindsight as it does mastering a piece of software. For creativity to really benefit from AI, it’s going to require mastering both. There’s little about understanding how to use an axe that requires you to also understand yourself, but to avoid our continual flirtation with slop, AI means this has never been more necessary.
Jazz Twemlow is a creative lead at Paper Moose, with a background in satirical comedy for television and work for NGOs focusing on behaviour change. He has also recently graduated in psychology.
