Against slop(py judgment) - by Spencer Kier
Spencer’s Substack
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Against slop(py judgment)<br>Pangram can't tell you what's worth reading.
Spencer Kier<br>Jul 23, 2026
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Disclosure: ChatGPT was unabashedly used to spar and synthesize.<br>Everyone is riled up about “slop.” But why, exactly? What even is it? And frankly, why do we even care?<br>TL;DR: “Slop” is a hackneyed label that collapses three distinct concerns — provenance, care, and quality — into one crude proxy: was AI used? Yet revealed preferences complicate the equation: when provenance is hidden or assumed, readers actually like and share AI writing. This suggests anti-slopers don’t always object to the output, but what authorship implies about effort and honesty. Care and quality are not inextricable, either: a person can make something bad on their own, and an AI-assisted work can be good or useful. Detection tools may approximate provenance (for now), but they can’t tell us whether something is good, resonant, and worth reading. And as human-AI creation evolves, that narrow function will become less useful. The durable response is not better detection, but better judgment.<br>Does anyone know what “slop” even is?
Ask ten people to define “slop” and you’ll get ten different answers. Ask why they dislike it — whatever it is — and you’ll find there’s no consensus. “Slop” is to creativity what fascism is to political ideology: amorphous, abused and trite.<br>I’ve found most people’s distaste for slop starts with a visceral “idk why, but I don’t like it.” They can’t quite put their finger on it. The reaction may be real, but you still need to articulate the accusation.<br>Is slop anything we have a hunch was generated by AI? Is it anything Pangram flags? Is it a harder-to-define quality entirely separate from the means of creation? Can a 100% human-created artifact be slop?<br>Surprisingly, I’ve seen many people who genuinely believe anything created with AI is de facto slop. That’s more or less also how Webster defines it. And if you’re one of those people, I’m unlikely to change your mind.<br>For the purposes of this piece, I’m going to focus on and attempt to steelman the most common, deeper objections I’ve heard or inferred:<br>First, people feel deceived . A human put their name on a piece, but they didn’t write it entirely using their own mind and hands — and they weren’t transparent about it.
Second, people feel AI generated writing is soulless . It feels hollow, generic, and disconnected. It’s empty mental and spiritual calories.
And lastly, AI writing lacks care . The writer requests more sustained attention from the reader than they were willing to put into the work. It lacks effort and thoughtfulness.
Said another way, I think people are primarily concerned about how a work was made (authorship, or provenance) , the effort and attention that went into it (care) , and the resulting artifact (quality) .<br>These are all fair concerns. But they’re also three distinct attributes, and an AI detection tool can only (probabilistically) speak to one of them. When Pangram flags AI writing and we scream “slop!”, we collapse three considerations into one, replacing our own judgement with a poor proxy.<br>Revealed preferences
People will fervently say they hate slop, but when provenance is obfuscated — when they don’t know who wrote the piece and how — their opinion often changes.<br>Two examples make the point:<br>Repeatedly, some of the best performing Substack essays use AI. These are essays that have garnered hundreds of thousand of views and shares.
Earlier this year, The New York Times ran a quiz where they put (blinded) human and AI writing samples side-by-side and asked humans to pick their favorite. They found that 3/5 respondents preferred AI writing.
In short, absent the creator, people aren’t always averse to AI writing. In fact, they may even prefer and recommend it!<br>Of course, this doesn’t mean that AI writing, or these specific pieces, are automatically of the highest quality. Performance and quality shouldn’t be conflated.<br>But the widespread preference does still tell us something interesting: namely, that whatever “offends” us about slop or AI writing is not always present or detectable in the writing itself.<br>If a work was unchanged, but a change in your perception alone changed your opinion, what should we infer?<br>This isn’t to say that the truth of authorship is unimportant. But it might mean the objection was not purely about care or quality.<br>Care and quality are not inextricable
Care complicates the equation further.<br>Substack co-founder Chris Best recently defined slop as “something that nobody believes in.” This gets closer than most definitions, pointing towards conviction, attention, and care. But it also suggests that “belief” is the defining ingredient in good work, which I’m not sure is true.<br>A restaurateur can sink tens of thousands of dollars and hours into a sandwich shop and still make a shitty BLT. A novice writer can care...