Everything I don’t like is slop - by Carly Ayres

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Everything I don’t like is slop<br>AI slop is everywhere—but can detectors tell us what deserves our attention? On Pangram, Substack, taste, trust, and the policing of culture.<br>Carly Ayres<br>Aug 12, 2026

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Slop was Merriam-Webster’s 2025 Word of the Year. Its definition was of the AI varietal, but soon we had other kinds of slop: grindslop for the performative glorification of work; tasteslop, a mishmash of generic aesthetic signals; foodslop, a slew of mid ingredients dumped together (see also: slop bowl); fast fashion slop, the Temu and Shein haul; Cocomelon slop for the short-form content screen-fed to kids; vibeslop, low‑quality code vibe-coded with AI.<br>Across all of them, the suffix implies: this is not good for you. What began as a label for machine-made filler has become a broader judgment about what’s worthy of our attention, and who’s to blame when that trust breaks.

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Slop bad

Slop poses as substance, but closer inspection reveals it to be hollow: a moodboard where images have been stripped of provenance, an essay about process devoid of output, an outfit bought on Temu that looks nothing like the photo and turns out to be plastic, a sentence that sounds good until you read the individual words and realize it’s not saying anything at all. It’s a simulacrum—the appearance of the thing without the thing itself. It looks like an essay, an opinion, food, clothing, but consuming it leaves you dissatisfied.

Call it a Dieter Ramification<br>At its best, AI slop is well-meaning, but meaningless; at its worst, it’s engineered to generate clicks and engagement. Like ragebait, it manipulates our precious time and attention, and in masquerading as meaning, it betrays our trust. From that angle, it’s infuriating. Maddening, even. How dare they?<br>Slop make mad

Perhaps that betrayal fueled the reaction I saw on the timeline last month. Slop was called out in its myriad forms, its slingers named and shamed, its transgressions screenshotted and shared. It was hunting season, and anyone who neglected to scrub the telltale traces of AI became fair game.

Lulu Cheng Meservey@lulumeservey

You forgot to cut the crust off your slop

Jeremy Stamper 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 @jeremymstamper

I’ve known Phoebe Gates online since she was a teen, so I might be biased but nothing in the Bloomberg reporting shows she personally engaged in wrongdoing. Phia’s browser extension opening background tabs and inserting affiliate codes comes from technical implementation choices

12:01 AM · Jul 11, 2026 · 792K Views

156 Replies · 435 Reposts · 13.9K Likes

Slop janitor

Slop filtration was the natural next step. Enter: Pangram, an AI detector built by Stanford roommates Max Spero and Bradley Emi. As the internet fills with synthetic filler, Pangram has positioned itself as a kind of slop janitor. In July, Substack integrated the tool, letting readers check whether a piece of text was written by a person, with AI assistance, or mostly by a model.<br>The feature is voluntary, and by its own admission, imperfect: as Substack notes, a detector can identify AI in text, not whether a human brought care, judgment, or originality to it. “Not everything made with AI is slop, and not all slop is made with AI,” writes Substack Co-founder and CEO Chris Best. The problem, he argues, is a mismatch: readers unwittingly investing attention in something with no human thought on the other end. Substack’s proposed fix is transparency: writers are encouraged to publish a “How I make this” disclosure, shown alongside their Pangram score.

My latest Extremely Online Report was mostly human-written<br>The reaction has been mixed. Some writers welcome it as a way to protect readers’ attention and reward human work. Others object that it can’t reliably distinguish wholesale AI-generated text from human writing edited with AI.

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Separating the AIs from the AI-nots

And that distinction matters—to some. For readers who object to any AI usage, the goal is simply to separate the AIs from the AI-nots. But for writers who fall somewhere along the sliding scale—copyediting, language support, research, other bounded tasks—being grouped with someone who prompts their way to a full article can feel unfair, especially given how ambient AI assistance already is. Consider AI-powered spellcheck, native to Google Docs for nearly a decade. As Runway Co-Founder and Co-CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela put is, “Unless you live in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle you are using AI every single day.”

nicole ruiz@nwilliams030

I think protesting using AI to copyedit / double check copy editing will sound completely insane in five years.<br>6:55 PM · Aug 6, 2026 · 4.52K Views

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The trouble is that AI is both implicated in slop and insufficient as its definition....