Defining Slop

If art is the work we do as humans to bring emotional labor to the table in order to make a connection, then slop is what we produce when we use machines to simulate the appearance of that labor.

The villain isn’t the machine. It’s us when we dodge the work and dress up the dodge as the work.

Clickbait has been around long enough that we know it isn’t written to inspire us, but to steal our attention. And what steals our attention spreads. It gets shared, reposted, talked about, until what steals attention matters more than what gets written.

The ragebaiters were already simulating long before AI showed up. AI just lowered the friction and scaled the simulation.

Real writers are still writing and they are writing better than before, because the tools sharpen the work (not the other way around), and because the craft now includes knowing when to use the machine and when to put it down.

Used well, AI is scaffolding. An extra set of hands. An editor. A research assistant. A way to expand the lens or talk an idea out. You build with it, then you take it down, and what stands is yours.

The ragebaiters ship the scaffolding and call it the building.

I never met someone who said, “This is a great paper because it’s in APA format.” APA format was never the point. It’s what we’ve been subjected to, but the constraint never determined the prose. The format is the container; the thinking is the content. Tools and prose are not the same thing. AI is closer to APA than to authorship—it shapes the container, not the content.

There will always be people who line up for shortcuts. The craft is always about the long way around. It was never about punctuation, or clever transitions, or perfectly balanced story arcs—it was the attention you gave your ideas. Writing is just the medium. Now that attention is scarce and everyone has the tools to turn out mediocre work, average got louder and more crowded. And so the critics show up and whine about em dashes, or whatever “tell” pops up next, because they’re not getting the attention they had before. Of course they call that craft.

If the only skill you’ve cultivated is hitting enter, the labor isn’t there to begin with. Having something to say is the labor. Getting to a first draft is the labor. Editing is tedious labor. There is no labor in a simulation. You can’t bring a point of view to the page if you haven’t done the work of having one to begin with. AI, on the other hand, can gesture at every point of view in theory and commit to none of them in practice.

Art is what happens when you care enough to take a side, do the work, and stay with it. AI can hold the ladder, but it can’t claim the building.