In defence of "AI slop"

LinkedIn has reached a rare consensus: there is too much AI slop, it has to stop, and we should all go back to writing every word ourselves.

I'm not joining in.

Some of what’s out there absolutely deserves the name. The generic paste-jobs, the accounts posting fifty times a day, the content nobody read before it went out - including the person who posted it. None of that is worth defending, and I won’t. The frustration is entirely real; our feeds are being flooded with low-effort noise that wastes everyone’s time.

But the label is being thrown at something else as well: people getting their ideas out for the first time. That part I will defend.

We never called it slop when it came with an invoice

I led my previous business for ten years. In that time, I hired a marketing agency, a brand agency, and a PR agency. In-house, I hired designers, copywriters, social media specialists, and more than one Head of Marketing.

Add it up across the decade, and it must run to hundreds of thousands of pounds, spent on people whose job was to help the business say what it wanted to say.

The work was good, and the process will be familiar to anyone who has bought it. You sat in a room, talked through the concept, they went away and drafted, you gave your input, and you went back and forth until you were both happy with it. What you were paying for was experience, and the reassurance of someone who had done it many times before, holding the pen.

Nobody called any of it inauthentic. Nobody insisted I write their own press releases, or asked whether the words in the brochure were typed by the person on the cover.

AI has taken a practice that was once the exclusive preserve of businesses with a comms budget and handed it to everyone.

All that support, and I still stayed quiet

Even with all of that help around me, I hardly ever posted on LinkedIn. The agencies could write for the business - the releases, the brochures, the campaigns. What they couldn't do was work out what I wanted to say. I never really knew who I was trying to speak to or how to get my message across, and no retainer fixed that. In the end, I just stayed quiet.

Hundreds of thousands of pounds bought my business its voice. It never bought me mine.

So when people insist the old way was authentic and the new way is slop, I think about what the old way actually got me: ten years of near silence.

The people finding their voice

Getting from an idea to a draft I was happy with used to take me so long that the idea would usually be lost. Since I started using AI as a sounding board to help shape my thoughts, the ideas make it out while they still matter.

I don't think I'm unusual. There are plenty of people who never published because they didn't rate their own writing - the owner with twenty years of opinions and no marketing budget, or the specialist who knows their subject inside out but hates writing about it. Behind many of those slightly awkward, AI-assisted posts is a person with something valuable to say who finally feels able to say it.

That seems worth celebrating, not sneering at.

The line is care, not the tool

So, where does finding your voice end and "slop" begin? Care and attention.

At The AR Dept., we actually built a workflow to codify this. We call it an "editorial loop" - a set of instructions we run whenever I have something to say. I don’t ask the AI to write from scratch or guess. I arrive with a specific idea, and the loop serves as a sounding board to help me shape, refine, test, and improve it. Where the substance has to be mine - the story, the opinion, the experience - it doesn't guess. It asks me.

These are my ideas and my views, the same as they would have been with the agencies, and the back-and-forth is the same, too. It just happens in minutes rather than weeks.

The draft still needs work: refining, challenging, and making it sound like you. Skip that, and you get the out-of-the-box ChatGPT post everyone can spot. Done well, you can't tell.

If you'd rather watch than take my word for it, I filmed our editorial loop running end-to-end on a real idea a few days ago - the one-line brief, the questions it asked me, the draft landing: https://www.tella.tv/video/moving-to-skill-focused-sessions-16xs

The idea in that recording became the article you're reading right now.

The only test that matters

Spotting AI has turned into a sport. Posts, videos, images, music - the game is to catch the tell, point it out, and dismiss whatever the creator was trying to say.

The game is exhausting - and it's failing. The tells are disappearing, the accusations increasingly land on people who wrote every word themselves, and the honest answer to "did AI touch this?" is heading towards "almost certainly, somewhere" for most of what any of us consume. As a filter, it tells you nothing worth knowing.

Which leaves the questions that were always the right ones: Is this something I connect with? Does this idea stimulate me, or help me see things more clearly?

One of my favourite short books is On Connection by Kae Tempest. In it, Tempest describes the connection between writer and reader as a circuit with three stations: the writer, the work, and the reader - each needing equal power before the bulb lights up."Words on a page are incomplete," they write. "For words to have meaning, they have to be read."

In Tempest's circuit, there is no fourth station for how the words were made. The spark of connection either flows when you read the piece, or it doesn't.

That's the only barometer that matters - the work, not the means of production.

So stop asking whether AI was involved. Ask whether it's any good.

This article is the argument

AI helped draft this piece - the same loop, running on an idea I had been sitting on for weeks. It asked me for the substance, I supplied it, and we went back and forth until it sounded like me. It is exactly the process I used to pay an agency for, and the ideas are still entirely mine.

I run a company that builds AI agents for businesses, so it would be a bit odd if I worked any other way. Used with care, these tools raise the standard of what a small business can put out.

And if you've made it this far, the test has already run. Whatever kept you reading, it wasn't how the words were made.

If writing has been the barrier between your ideas and an audience, that barrier has gone. Have a crack at it.

The feed will survive a few more first drafts.