You copied that off the internet
What a kid who didn’t capitalize his personal pronouns taught me about AI slop.
Slop tells you where something came from. It doesn’t tell you whether it works.
Senior year of high school, a classmate told me my essay sounded like I’d copied it off the internet.
For context, I’d spent two years in honors English (four, if we count middle school) plus an AP class, pulled A’s in all of them, and only ended up in a regular Common Core class because I already had the credits and wanted to take it easy.
So I read my essay out loud, got accused of plagiarism, and then he read his. The sentence structure was a crime scene and he didn’t even capitalize his I’s when used as personal pronouns.
I’ve been thinking about that kid a lot lately, because “that looks like AI” has become the new “you copied that off the internet.”
We recently presented three creative directions to a founder, all three bespoke and made by hand, with zero AI anywhere in the process. We turned them around fast, three hero sections in a day and a half, because we’ve done this enough times to know the patterns cold. He came back saying it all looked “suspiciously AI generated.”
Here they are:
Not a single pixel of it was. His own site, on the other hand, was AI generated… and it was poorly designed.
Which raises two questions worth actually answering: what counts as slop, and are we measuring where something came from, or whether it works?
Let’s start with the first one, because there absolutely is slop out there and some of it deserves every bit of the eye-roll it gets. You know the pill badge with the little dot glowing behind the label, the purple-to-pink gradient bleeding through the hero headline, and the Claude-ification of the color palette, where the site comes back dressed in the same cream and burnt orange as the chat window that built it. You probably even know the same handful of annoying typefaces, too (Instrument, Fraunces, and their annoying relatives).
Those deserve the criticism, but not because a model made them. They deserve it because everybody’s model made them, which renders the design undifferentiated. They fail at the job of being exceptional and unique.
The problem is that the word doesn’t stop there. We had a section get called AI slop for a row of four icons sitting above headers and subheaders, which is about as standard a convention as design has.
It fit the rest of the design language, flowed in between the other layouts, and got the point across. It worked.
Copy gets it even worse. Take a line like this:
No signup form, no dashboard hopping, no copying API keys by hand, no credit card.
That’s got flagged as slop for being a list with commas in it. And this one really made me scratch my head because, as a novice copywriter, how else are you supposed to write a list?
Caesar wrote in threes, Jefferson wrote in threes, and I’m fairly confident “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” did not come out of a chatbot.
The second question is the one I actually care about:
Where something came from shouldn’t matter.
I’m not going to judge a sentence by whether it was banged out on a typewriter or a keyboard, I’m going to judge the words. And for what it’s worth, people are pretty bad at the origin question anyway. In a 2024 study in Scientific Reports, readers trying to pick out the AI-written poems landed below chance, at 46.6%, and rated the AI poems higher than the real ones. Another study found AI faces got judged as human more often than actual human faces, and the people who got the most wrong were the most confident about it. (Sound familiar?)
But even if you can spot it, who cares? Our job is to critique the words, not the toolchain.
We have to strike at the core of the issue and as "what are we actually trying to do here?"
We’re not trying to win Cleos, and we’re not trying to be poets. Copy on a marketing site is a totally different game. The job is to get as much information across as clearly and straightforwardly as possible, so somebody takes an action that works out in our favor. Period.
Whether that’s signing up for a newsletter, starting a free trial, or whatever the button says. It’s not writing for the sake of art, it's done with a specific objective in mind.
By that measure, AI copy holds up really, really well. It’s clear, it’s easy to read, and it rarely buries the benefit under a pun somebody was hoping their mom would put on the refrigerator.
We’ve driven over $100M in revenue for our clients, and we’ve used AI on the copy from the very start, in every single one of those scenarios. Checked and vetted by our team, sure, but still written with AI. Nobody clicking “Start free trial” ever stopped to ask or care about who wrote the button.
And yes, you’re abso-fucking-lutely right, I used AI to write this newsletter. The ideas are mine, the stories are mine, and nothing goes out until I’ve approved it. The tool just makes me more effective at saying what I already wanted to say and helps me produce more.
Did it read any worse? Didn't think so... then again the bar was pretty low 😉
“Slop” is a verdict on where something came from. “Ineffective” is the verdict that matters.
The next time you want to call something slop, do yourself a favor and finish the sentence: articulate what it fails to do, not where it came from.
— Zach
