Slop in, slop out

Every few months I open LinkedIn, because I’ve forgotten what it’s like in there. Then I scroll for five minutes and remember. It’s exactly as bad as last time, and somehow I manage to forget that every single time.

The thing I keep wondering is whether these people know it’s slop. Some probably do and some don’t. For the ones who do, it’s a trade. A post that takes thirty seconds to generate and still gets some reach is too good to pass on. For the ones who don’t, I think their slop meter got adjusted in the wrong direction a long time ago, and they have no way of seeing that from the inside.

That second group is what this post is about, because I think it can happen to any of us. Whatever you feed your brain becomes what normal looks like to you, and your judgement of what’s good and bad gets built on top of that, including your judgement of your own work.

This matters because judgement is turning into the main thing a person brings. When a model can produce the text, the code and the logo, what’s left for you is deciding whether it’s any good. In a time when AI can produce almost anything, judgement matters more than it ever has, and it’s the thing slop wears down.

I know every generation says this about something. Novels, TV and comics all got called brain rot at some point. The difference now is that making the stuff costs nothing, and nothing sorts it before it reaches you.

AI is the accelerator

I work at an AI company and use these tools all day, so I get more exposure to this than most people. Where I notice it most is in programming. Not long ago we wrote code by hand and reviewed it by hand. Now a model writes most of it and a person reviews it, and the direction we’re heading is that the review gets automated too. Every step takes away one more place where a person with an opinion about good code looks at the thing.

But I’m also chronically online, and what made it click for me was seeing it offline. When I’m back in Sweden, the sidewalk signs outside bars have AI generated images on them. Restaurant menus have it. At one point I could tell which model had generated the logo of a local café.

And it makes sense. For that café owner, a good enough logo for a hundredth or even a thousandth of what a designer costs is worth it. They’d rather spend their time and money on customer service, running the business and their Google rating. The LinkedIn poster is doing the same math: when something is that cheap to make, it’s hard to say no to. Cheap logos aren’t new either. Before AI, someone would just draw something quick and call it done. AI made that faster and put it everywhere, and I find it interesting to see it in real life, on a street in Sweden, and not only in my feed. It’s also how slop reaches people who have never heard the word.

Ads and news are two other sources I think about a lot, and both are older than AI.

Ads

Ads are a different kind of slop. A lot of them are really well produced, so for me slop is about the underlying incentive and not the production quality. There’s no good faith in an ad. It exists to get you to buy or do something you weren’t going to, and it takes up room in your head to do it. It’s trying to replace a decision you would have made yourself. That’s propaganda. We mostly use that word for politics, but it’s the same thing when it’s for a product.

Then there’s paid sponsorship. I don’t have anything against it as such, but it’s the one to be most aware of, because it’s propaganda disguised as the friendly opinion of someone you’ve built up trust with. And sometimes it isn’t even disclosed, which it’s supposed to be. That’s the worst version, because then you can’t tell whether this person likes the thing or got paid to like it.

My takeaway is to avoid ads wherever you can, because they pollute your brain space.

News

I recently watched a Subway Takes I agreed with 100%. Stop consuming the news, because headlines are by definition the outliers, the crazy stuff that happened yesterday, effectively teaching you how the world doesn’t work. And it works on us because of how the brain is wired. Threats get priority, it’s the fight or flight thing, and negative headlines measurably get more clicks. You come out of it feeling informed, when really you’re scared and up to date.

The slower stuff, weekly analysis and explainers someone spent months on, gives you a model of how things work. The 24-hour cycle is entertainment that you get to feel responsible about watching.

Same slop, different medium

The LinkedIn post, the ad, the sponsored recommendation and the headline are all the same thing in different mediums. They were made for the benefit of whoever made them, and your attention is the payment. I don’t think anybody needs to be evil for this to work. The platforms get paid per minute of attention, so they serve whatever holds it, and whether it was any good for you doesn’t show up anywhere in their numbers.

It’s bad because of what it does to your judgement. If you consume this stuff every day it becomes normal, and your sense of what’s good gets built from whatever is normal to you. When you make something, you hold it up against that sense to decide if it’s worth putting out in the world. If it has drifted, you’ll put out slop and feel fine about it. I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going on with a good part of LinkedIn.

Another version of slop is food slop, better known as fast food. It’s cheap, it’s everywhere, and it’s made to be eaten more than to be good for you. One burger does nothing. But if it’s most of what you eat, your taste adjusts to it and you feel it over time. It’s the same thing here, only for your head.

What you consume ends up in what you produce, even if you don’t notice it, and it can take a long time before it shows. You can already see it with AI, where people are starting to talk like the models they use. There’s nothing weird about that, it’s natural behavior. We’re molded by our environment, which is why the environment matters.

You can see the same pattern in how people look. If your feed is full of filtered faces, injections and procedures, your idea of what a normal face looks like shifts, and you start feeling like you have to meet it. Plastic surgeons even have a name for it, because people started showing up asking to look like their own filtered selfies. It isn’t real and nobody has to meet it. The bar went up there, where with slop it goes down, but the mechanism is the same. Your sense of normal comes from what you look at, and what you look at was picked by something that gets paid for your attention.

So how do you avoid it?

One thing you can do is pay for silence, and I mean that pretty literally. Your brain needs empty room to think and to come up with anything of its own, and this stuff expands to fill every gap you’ve got. Silence is turning into a luxury, something you pay extra for, and I think it’s worth paying for if you can. If there’s an ad-free version of something you use every day, do the math. How much is your free space worth? How much is silence worth? How much is it worth to open an app and not get bullshit thrown at you? For me the answer is quite a lot, more than the subscription costs anyway.

Another thing is to keep checking your own judgement. This one is harder because nobody sells it. When you consume something, ask who made it and what they want from you. When you make something, ask whether it’s good, or just as good as everything around you. And go back to things you know are great every once in a while, so you remember what that feels like.

Finally, go create things, and get feedback on them from people you trust. Avoiding slop doesn’t make you good at anything by itself. Making things is also how you find out how hard it is to not make slop. Slop is the path of least resistance. The default option and the first draft are always right there, and you only feel how strong that pull is when you’re the one doing the work. And since you can’t see your own judgement drifting, you need someone else to tell you when it has. That’s what builds the meter back up, and it compounds.

I’ll probably still open LinkedIn again in a few months, because I’ll have forgotten.