you are not in the race against slop cannons

SubscribeSign in

you are not in the race against slop cannons<br>why humans who care will always have an advantage in the coming AI slopocalypse

Hilary Gridley<br>Apr 20, 2026

49

10

Share

A colleague once recommended I read Discussing Design by Adam Connor and Aaron Irizarry, a book about how to have better conversations about design. It was so good, in fact, that I never gave the book back to her, something I feel bad about like three times a week. Sorry Meg.<br>The book’s premise is simple: critique is a skill. Which is funny, because a lot of people stake their whole identity on being critical despite being pretty bad at it.<br>Connor and Irizarry’s core move is to separate critique from reaction. Reaction is gut — “those colors are ugly,” “this feels off,” “I don’t like it.” Reaction can be informative, but it isn’t critique. Critique is analytical: it compares a design to the objectives it was trying to accomplish, and examines where the design is or isn’t hitting those objectives.

Subscribe

Which means critique has a precondition. Before you can critique something, you have to name what the thing is trying to do. You can say: my understanding is this is trying to accomplish XYZ, and here is where it’s succeeding or falling short against that. Without a stated goal, you don’t have critique.

what is slop?

People refer to AI writing and AI design as “slop.” Originally, that word meant something specific —the output was very bad. Videos of Shrimp Jesus level bad. Over time, the models have gotten much better at making good outputs with minimal prompting. But we still call those things slop. “Slop” basically means, now, anything that is recognizable as AI — regardless of the objective quality level.<br>Which is weird, if you think about it.<br>Everyone hates AI writing, including me. It is not “good.” But is it bad? I mean, if I fell asleep in 2021 and woke up today, and someone showed me an AI-generated essay and told me a computer wrote it, I would be floored. I would think: wow, this is much better than what the vast majority of people could accomplish.<br>When I rolled out Slacky, my custom GPT that tightens up Slack messages, the people using it immediately started sending me clearer messages. The AI was taking their rushed, dashed-off-between-meetings writing and making it better. (For the record, one of my top-three most-used prompts remains “edit this for clarity.” AI is very good at that.)<br>Whenever I talk about AI writing online, I get yelled at. I’m in and around social circles of people who care deeply about the craft of writing, and they haaaaaate AI writing, and find it weird that I would defend something so aesthetically rotten. But this is where I like to uno-reverso their snobbishness back at them, and remind them that criticism in a vacuum is midwit stuff. You cannot say something is bad without understanding what it is trying to accomplish.<br>Yes, AI writing is stylistically atrocious, especially when you move beyond the atomic unit of the sentence. But if the goal is to convey information in the clearest way possible, then AI writing is quite good, and in fact far better than what the vast majority of people write. And for 98% of writing, clarity matters more than stylistic distinction.<br>Even at the sentence level, AI is drawing on effective rhetorical strategies when it defaults to “it’s not X, it’s Y.” That construction was not considered bad writing three years ago. It’s closer to objectively good than objectively bad. So it’s strange, when you think about it, that it’s now widely considered bad writing. Offensively bad writing, even.

design slop

The same thing is happening in design, though it’s more of a moving target.<br>When vibe coding first emerged, the purple gradient was a dead giveaway. The number of times I landed on a website, saw some purple gradient, and thought ugh, this vibe-coded-ass website, gross… Then Anthropic released their front-end design skill, and everyone was like, WOAH, design is saved!! No more purple gradients!! I can finally vibe-code a beautiful website!!<br>But pretty quickly everyone realized those websites all kind of looked the same, or at least had specific tells.<br>Last week, Anthropic released Claude Design, and the reaction was: WOAH, now I can REALLY design LIKE A REAL DESIGNER!! People started breathlessly posting their designs online, and everyone was wowed. But then they started noticing …. certain patterns … showing up in everyone’s work.

(Source)

(Source)<br>Notice the one italic serif word among many bold sans-serif words. The all-caps eyebrow label with a leading dot and bullet separators (NEW · MAX-CUSHION TRAINER · EMBER FLARE // MISSION CLASS · CREWED LUNAR FLYBY).

the problem with predictability

Over the weekend, I tweeted:

hilary gridley@yourgirlhils

today’s amazing new AI-designed artifacts will look like slop in a month, once everyone learns to recognize the patterns the model falls back on. like...