On Slop

TL;DR: What is slop, and why? Is it fundamental? Is it in the room with us right now? And, most importantly, how do we exorcise it?Previously in this series: This Week In Fashion and On Automatic Ideas. A potential post for this Substack starts when I pick up an idea by talking to a smart person or revisiting an evergreen topic. The idea then simmers for weeks before, with help from Claude, I run experiments or work out the argument behind the idea. If the idea survives some mild red-teaming[1]. I then draft section by section with Claude[2], and eventually the post lands here.The fact that I am using AI to write should not come as a shock - it is essentially the premise of this blog. Hence, I will not apologise. Okay, no, changed my mind, I will apologise. Some recent posts contained some very sloppy language that some of you rightly noticed. Mea culpa.In the grand scheme of things, I do not think this is a huge deal[3]. Every post is a choice between publishing something imperfect and not publishing at all, and I force myself to publish[4]. Still, you deserve prose that doesn’t physically hurt. So I tried to fix it, and here’s what I learned.Inside you there are two slops“Slop” has become the standard word for unwanted, low-effort AI-generated content. The central claim of this essay is that the word conflates two distinct phenomena. The first is bad thought, i.e. writing that is superficial, contradictory, or incoherent, a problem that long predates language models. AI accelerated the speed at which a half-formed idea can become a clean, confident-looking page, putting more polished-looking bad thought in circulation[5].The second phenomenon is a specific register, the recognisable style that is adopted by AI. The early, lexical tells have graduated into memes, and the more recent tells come in the form of recognisable cadences.Independent of the input, the slop machine turns everything (good thought and bad thought alike) into beautifully glazed… donuts? Not sure