AI Slop: How To Avoid Adding to the Problem While Still Leveraging AI for Its Benefits

AI isn’t going anywhere, and neither is the temptation to hit generate and call it a day.

If you’re struggling to identify what AI writing looks like and aren’t sure what makes human writing good, you risk leading your audiences on a straight and narrow path into “today’s fast-paced, rapidly evolving digital landscape,” where “artificial intelligence revolutionizes paradigm shifts.”

Heaven forbid, you might even ask them to “unlock their potential” and “delve deep into this synergy,” leveraging AI to maximize efficiency while “seamlessly synergizing workflows to avoid generating unoptimized, robotic content clutter.”

Oh, the humanity. Let’s not do that.

What Is AI Slop?

AI slop is mass-produced, devastatingly generic AI-generated content with precious, precious little depth to subsist on. If language had junk food, it’d be AI slop. Its repetitive, formulaic phrasing, sentence structures and choice of verbiage smothers the message beneath the words, and your audience along with it.

When large language models (LLMs) began assisting in the automation of digital content, we humans saw it as a strategic loophole. We began producing content farms to trick search engines’ algorithms, as well as fake images, memes and AI-generated videos to use as clickbait on social media platforms. The loophole backfired when this tidal wave of sludge pushed the search market to tighten the ropes on content quality. 

Here are some examples of sloshy AI I’ve come across recently:

• Low-effort TikToks: A video on the social media feeds that had “CTA:” written before the CTA in the closed captions. This is an example of AI slop.
• Misinformation: Fake scientific papers claiming that “rogue black holes” are going to consume the universe.
• Slop content: The word “tapestry” (which is impressively archaic in AI’s timeline, but still frequents in economic, communal, cultural and data references).

You’ll see a list of red flags to check your copy for later, but the preface to that list is: there’s no way to make it exhaustive. That’s because there is a level of subjectivity to AI slop. The more you work with AI, the more evident it becomes, though even humans can produce copy that sounds like AI slop in some form.

Now, AI tools do have their advantages. Using them is by no means wrong or bad. I’d encourage other writers to experiment and to use discernment as they do.

How AI Slop Impacts Content Quality and Brand Reputation

Many readers don’t mind AI-generated copy, provided it’s good. Good AI copy happens when a human edits and refines the work to achieve a natural, human-centric flow that generative AI’s perfectionistic tendencies don’t save space for.

If you’re just hitting generate and post, the risks are:

• Declining engagement metrics: People disengage when messages are delivered from some fantasmic linguistic void.  
• Lower trust and brand authority: Low-quality content damages your brand authority, and high-quality content fosters trust.
• SEO volatility: Google doesn’t penalize AI, but it does penalize poor-quality copy. AI SEO content writers do a great job at optimizing, but without a leash, they can cause more harm via messaging and voice.
• Lower conversion rates: If your readers don’t like your copy, you’re not helping them reach the end goal.
• Audience fatigue: Compelling copy keeps people engaged. Boring, brain-rot copy wears them out.
• Commoditization of brand identity: Your brand identity ceases to be an asset the moment it becomes interchangeable.
• Content indistinguishable from competitors: If AI is in charge of your brand voice, every man and his dog will sound like your brand, too. With 53% of marketers struggling to differentiate their content, it’s more critical now than ever before to protect your voice.

Brand aside, navigating these waters relies on the people using AI for digital content and the AI model itself. So, what can you do about AI slop — and who needs to hear this message?

The Avoidable Dangers of AI Slop (and How To Overcome Them)

For the sake of the argument, imagine a world with three types of people: 

1. Non-writers who are unfamiliar with AI content.
2. Writers who are unfamiliar with AI content.
3. Writers who are familiar with AI content. 

The first two groups are potentially the most vulnerable to AI slop. Here’s why:

Problem #1: Non-Writers Lack Foundational Writing Skills

If you’re not a writer, it’s hard to discern what makes good writing (and therefore identify when AI has produced bad writing). The concept is standard across any discipline, from science and architecture to infinity and beyond.

Solutions For Non-Writers

Read a book. No, seriously, if you’re not a writer and you’re using AI to generate copy, read a single book about writing principles and get some of the basics down. “On Writing Well,” by William Zinsser and “Writing Tools,” by Roy Peter Clarke, are the two I’d send your way, but there are a gazillion others out there that’ll tell you what you need to know.

Problem #2: Unfamiliarity With AI Copy = Limited Awareness

If you’re unfamiliar with AI content, it’s initially hard to recognize AI slop. At first glance, AI content usually does look fine. It’s after you’ve read about inanimate objects and abstract concepts doing things “quietly in the background” for the 27th time that you realize people — even those terrible at writing — are not that uninventive.

Solutions for AI-Newcomers

If you’re less familiar with AI tools, I’d suggest smashing out another AI article and using the time you saved writing it yourself to create some experimental AI-generated content. Ask for something like 10 social posts, a 1,000-word blog copy and a few 500-word blogs. Switch between popular platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude to get familiar with the patterns. Those patterns are AI slop.

How To Identify Text-Based AI Slop

Here’s that list we were talking about. I could probably make this collection of AI tropes as long as the article itself, so use it as a baseline but not as an exhaustive reference. Here are some common, repetitive quirks and phrasings you might find in your AI-generated content:

• Zero unique examples: This includes anecdotes, first-party data or user-generated content.
• Excessive hedging: “In today’s fast-paced world…”
• Repetitive sentence structures: Including the “It’s not X; it’s Y” rhetoric.
• Formulaic lists of three: Such as, “By automating workflows, optimizing data and streamlining communications, organizations can…”
• Repetitive, ambiguous references: Often, they’re referring to something that happens in a professional environment on a “Tuesday afternoon.”
• Generic introductions and conclusions: Run-of-the-mill, low-quality content that’s screaming for depth.
• No strong point of view: AI’s sycophantic disposition leans to the center, rather than representing an opinion that someone might disagree with.
• Words that don’t mean anything: Think about “The compounding effect here is real,” and “That distinction matters.”
• Specific words that frequent AI copy: Some examples are fast-paced, secret sauce, quietly (more recent), paradigm shift, cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, testament, realm and delve.
• Hypophoras mid-copy: Questions the AI will ask and answer immediately, like “And, honestly?” or “The catch?”
• Utterly made-up data: Gemini is the worst. It’ll give you a stat, link you to the “source” (which is actually just a Google search page), provide you a reference quote in that “source,” and the whole thing is a hallucination.
• Nonsensical cause and effect: Unabashed disinformation, including statements like, “By unlocking your creative freedom, you can learn about the market shifts impacting real businesses today.”

The last one’s especially insidious because if you’re not paying full attention as you edit the copy, it’s easy to gloss over. The words seem to flow, the reasoning seems logical — until you really think about what’s being said. These often show up when you’re either creating large blocks of text in one go, or iterating tons of small blocks of copy, say email subject lines or posts for social media accounts.

To throw a spanner in the works, remember that large language models are trained on human writing, so all of these patterns are genuinely human and are not forbidden from digital content in general. The idea is to identify them in your AI-generated copy and use critical discernment when you decide whether to keep them, reprompt or edit them out.

How To Avoid Creating More AI Slop While Still Using AI for Content

You can use AI to make your content. With 87% of other marketers using generative platforms for collateral, why wouldn’t you?  

As someone who’s used AI models a lot in copy creation (including this article), I’d probably generate between 5k and 15k words to hash out ideas, find synonyms, create better examples and straighten out my phrasing. In the final copy, I’d use about a max of 100 to 400 words generated by AI.

Here’s how to achieve polished, human-sounding copy without the shameless AI slop in your ChatGPT collab.

• Familiarity: Just get comfortable with the tools and how they behave. The increase in AI mentioned in marketing job listings increased from 30% to 37% between January and May 2026. Think of it as part education, part brand-protection and part future-proofing.
• Thoughtful editing: Don’t go to the supermarket hungry, and don’t edit AI writing when your brain is overloaded from generating copy. Take a break, stare at a tree. Go in with a fresh mind.
• Research: Always fact-check information produced by AI — especially in the GEO days, where accurate data supports your chances of mentions in generative search. It can help to find your stats first, rather than weaving supporting information in later. I’ve found Perplexity and Claude the most reliable. Also, watch out for ChatGPT-provided links; they contain a UTM tracking code at the end of the URL slug “utm_source=chatgpt.com.”
• Outlining: AI offers pretty generic outlines, so injecting human expertise and discernment early sets a solid direction for a human-centric article.
• Summarization: Works in two ways: ask AI to summarize your logic and verify whether it makes sense, or ask AI to summarize complex concepts to clarify your understanding as you’re writing. Especially useful for those thought leadership pieces, analysis and market reports.
• Ideation: At any stage in the article, check in with the chatbot for ideas to add direction, depth or address search intent. Always combine this with your own judgment.
• Identifying content gaps: GEO is also pushing us to write the answer first, then break into context and supporting data later. To ensure you comprehensively address search intent, ask AI for fan-out queries and missing information that could help you rank.

In my experience, using AI for copywriting doesn’t take less time. It can sometimes take more time. But it sure will strengthen your delivery and your arguments. The result is higher-quality copy, enhanced audience trust and engagement and increased brand authority.  

Good Writing Is Still the Standard. AI Only Changed Who Upholds It.

You can put a terrible driver in a Mercedes, and they’ll still be a terrible driver. You can put a good driver in a CarGPT, and they’ll still be a good driver. The key takeaway here is that the vehicle, like AI, will always be a tool.

The quality of the user journey you create with AI assistance depends entirely on your skill and awareness throughout the process. Happy wr-ai-ting!