AI Slop Is About Outsourcing the Thinking

There's a lot of negativity around using AI for writing. Someone can post an article on X, and people will tag accounts that try to analyze whether an article was written by AI. Comments will be flooded with “slop.” The same goes for Substack. I saw a post titled “I will kill you if you write using AI” or something similar.

I was always curious why there's so much hate for using AI in writing. No one seems to be against using AI to summarize articles, write code, or perform other tasks. So why is writing different?

In many ways, LLMs are great at writing. They're trained on almost every form of text on the Internet and can create clear and polished sentences in one shot. How could one person outwrite a model that is trained on billions of writing samples?

I believe the pushback on AI writing is that AI creates content without a unique voice, not that AI writes worse than humans. A powerful aspect of writing is that it allows writers to express ideas through their own unique voice. But if you give 500 different people the same model and ask them to write, you'll likely end up with 500 posts discussing different topics but, most likely, with a similar voice.

I know this because I used to use AI to fully produce writing when I first started on Substack. Looking back at those posts, I cringe and edit them. They read like thousands of generic LinkedIn posts, all having the same tone, phrasing, and sentence structure. If you hid the names, I wouldn't be able to tell who wrote which post. When everyone is using the same model, writing starts to converge toward the same voice.

I'm not against AI. I think AI is one of the most important technological innovations within the past two decades. Aside from environmental concerns around extreme energy usage and the need to build massive data centers, I don't understand the negativity toward AI.

Most people don't even understand what slop actually means. The phrase gets thrown around whenever something involves using AI. To me, “AI slop” is about outsourcing the thinking process to AI rather than using AI as a tool.

If you're generating your own ideas and writing in your own voice, and using AI simply to improve clarity, I don't see why that should be considered slop. But if you're letting AI decide what to say and how to say it, then that enters the territory of slop.

In that sense, I think outsourcing the thinking to AI is far more slop than outsourcing the writing.