AI Doesn’t Make Slop. People Do.

By: Gavin Wills, SVP, Technology

Slop has an author

Everyone is complaining about AI slop. The bland LinkedIn posts. The reports that say nothing in 2,000 words. The emails that read like a brochure. The easy conclusion is that AI produces garbage.

I don’t buy it. AI doesn’t produce slop. People do.

Slop is what happens when someone hits generate, skims the result and hits send. That’s not a technology problem. That’s a laziness problem.

We wouldn’t accept this from a colleague

Think about how you’d treat a first draft from a new team member. You’d read it properly. You’d question the numbers, cut the waffle, and ask what they meant by that third paragraph. And you’d do the same with your own drafts.

Now think about how most people treat AI output. A quick scan, a tweak to the opening line, and it’s out the door. We hold the machine to a lower standard than the intern, then act surprised when the work is worse.

Cognitive surrender

There’s a quieter problem too. A lot of people don’t push back on AI because they aren’t sure they’re right. The output sounds confident. It’s well structured. It uses the right words. So when something feels off, they assume the AI knows better and leave it in.

That instinct is backwards. If something feels off, it usually is. Your experience is the one thing the AI doesn’t have. Trust it.

This isn’t new, by the way. Researchers have studied automation bias, our habit of letting the machine do the checking for us, since the 1990s. The AI version now has its own name, cognitive surrender: when you stop thinking for yourself and just go with the AI’s answer.

The researchers behind it draw a line I think matters. Handing a task to a tool while you stay in charge is offloading. That’s fine, it’s what tools are for. Surrender is when you go with the AI’s output and never notice the handover.

If you can’t explain it, don’t ship it

The worst version is when people put their name on work they don’t fully understand. Or worse, work they don’t actually believe.

A simple test: if you can’t explain a point without looking at the screen, it shouldn’t be in there. If you wouldn’t say it out loud in a meeting, don’t publish it. Slop isn’t just bad writing. It’s writing nobody stands behind.

The tool helps. The work is yours.

None of this is an argument against AI. I use it all the time. It’s brilliant for getting past a blank page, tightening a messy paragraph, or stress-testing an idea.

But it’s a tool for crafting, not a replacement for thinking. The moment your name goes on something, you own it. The good bits, the bad bits, and the slop.

So before you hit send, ask yourself one question: would I be happy defending every line of this? If the answer is no, the problem isn’t the AI.

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