Welcome to the Age of Slop

Low quality AI generated content now saturates every corner of the internet. The word I keep coming back to is slop. It's everywhere, and it's only getting worse.

But here's what I think people are missing: slop isn't just a content problem anymore. It's becoming a product problem.

Everyone is talking about AI generated articles, AI generated images, AI generated videos flooding our feeds. That's real. But I think the more interesting — and more concerning — wave is the apps themselves becoming slop. It's becoming easier and easier for anyone to spin up a working application. And while that sounds like a good thing, the cost is intentionality. The cost is design.

You can already see it happening. Every AI demo online has the same gradient aesthetic. The same layout. The same feel. Not because gradients are inherently bad, but because when there's no human design thinking behind something, the model just defaults to the average. It regresses to the mean. And the mean is boring and forgettable.

This is only going to accelerate. We're not far from a world where someone opens their phone, tells Siri to build them a tracking app, and it just does. That app will technically work. But it'll be missing the thing that makes software actually good — the intentionality behind it. The decisions that only come from a person who actually thought hard about the problem.

Social media taught us this pattern already. Social media was a genuinely great tool. But the cost of that system was the attention economy — clickbait, outrage, garbage optimized for engagement. We got the tool, and slop was the price we paid.

AI is the same story. Generative AI is a genuinely great tool. But slop is the price we're paying. And unlike social media, where the slop lived in the feed, with AI the slop is going to live in the product itself.

I don't think there's an obvious solution. But I see it coming.