Sorry no audio version this week, an unpleasant cold has taken my voice out.

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The slop tide is rising

Slop was one of the words of 2024, the 21^st century update of spam. To describe the tsunami of low-grade, AI-generated junk that is starting to fill our social streams and inboxes.

You think it’s bad now. It’s only just begun. Meta has been experimenting with entirely AI-generated account characters and views them as the future of the platform.

LinkedIn has become unusable in 2025. It feels like they threw a big switch marked “Suck” on January 1. It’s a combo of algorithm changes and their boosting of AI contributions. My feed now is mostly three-week old posts. Much of it AI filler, and insufferable Amway-style plans on how you can get rich by building AI agents.

As always, the question is: if it’s such a sure path to riches, why aren’t they doing it themselves?

Hustle bros now have all the near-zero cost tools to churn out unlimited shitty posts and content with minor variations for click-testing.

Here’s how that looks.

“Flood LinkedIn/X/YouTube…”.

All those hustlers with content firehoses, itching to flood platforms that you, a normal person, once enjoyed for information and entertainment. As they say in the Old Testament, we shalt need a bigger ark.

Side-note: I know people who have developed cloud-based platforms for specialty industries “where middle managers are drowning in spreadsheets”. Their products are objectively superior in every way to Excel. They allow people to do work in less than 10% of the time of Excel, with accurate real-time updates for all users.

There was no “crushing it” in any “vertical”. Those new products have had almost no traction, because middle managers feel safe with Excel and they find any change threatening. Better products don’t overcome human nature. That’s why business is harder than Greg would have you believe.

 

Infinite supply equals zero value

 

A standard tech belief is that all the old rules are dead, but I’m going to take you back to an old friend from your high school economics years: the glut part of basic supply and demand.

As the supply of anything approaches infinity, it’s market value approaches zero. This is what have now: infinite content of zero value. If something is free and easy to do, everyone will do it, so there’s no competitive advantage.

That’s a problem for your brand, for both platforms and message.

It’s a golden oldie bit of advice that if your revenue depends on any particular platform, it’s not a question of if they’ll fuck you, but when. Platforms will do whatever they like to maximise their cash flow, and they’re actively encouraging streams laden with synthetic garbage. You will wake up one morning with your revenue tap turned off.

Then there’s the message. Hey cool, you made something that looks and feels like marketing with a few simple prompts. Here’s the issue though: people hate marketing and avoid it wherever possible.

You think it’s awesome because it’s your product. It’s like showing pictures of your kids to random strangers on the train. They’re not feeling the same magic you are.

 

The Polyester Test

 

When I had a corporate marketing job, there was a guy in one of the interstate offices who was my yardstick test audience.

He was a serious man in a polyester business shirt who had firm ideas on how we should get that message across: via serious, corporate descriptions of what we did, and how good we were at doing it. Preferably including the word solutions.

I’d copy him in on ideas for marketing campaigns. Oh, how he hated them. “Not corporate at all,” he would respond. “I don’t know about you, but when I went to school we were taught not to begin a sentence with ‘and’.”

It became known as the Polyester Test.

He offered a valuable service, in that if he didn’t hate an idea, I’d put that idea in the bin and try harder. Because clearly that idea wasn’t interesting enough for anyone to take any notice of, out there in the crowded world of messages.

Generative AI is a Godzilla-size version of that guy. Making sure you put out the average of every bland corporate cliché ever set to PowerPoint. So you end up promoting your category rather than your individual brand, in the unlikely event of anyone reading your dull output from the magic word machine. Whatever benefit goes to the category leader, not you.

 

Disclaimer time

 

It’s time for the standard disclaimer that AI obviously has lots of valuable uses and it’s transformed entire areas of our businesses. I‘m talking about the lazy-ass use of AI to communicate, with zero effort or thought.

The art of AI is knowing when to use it. Reducing hack work, moving data from hidden places to somewhere it’s useful, summarising boring documents, generating irrelevant policies for tender documents because procurement wants to tick that box, so much time to be saved. Here’s a good list of content production tools from PR guy Trevor Young that popped up as I was writing this. All great stuff.

But without putting the work and thought into being different, you’re just one more penguin in the vast squawking colony.

 

Apple helps doofuses stay on your payroll

 

It’s not just brands. This blandness has a similar effect at a personal level.

Let’s consider this current Apple ad, presenting a new feature like it’s inarguably a good thing. Rather than solving one problem and creating another.

Warren, the office doofus, writes a mildly goofy email. Then his iPhone AI converts it to generic corporate-speak that says … nothing of any value.

 

 

(Shout-out to Warrens, Garys, Janines and other people whose names are shorthand for Generic Cubicle Inhabitant. As a fellow owner of a bygone-era name, I feel your pain.)

Bad expression of an idea doesn’t always mean it’s a bad idea. But it’s a clue that you might be about to read poorly thought-out brain spasms from a doofus. Now AI helps doofuses remain on your payroll, hidden from view, firing off plausible generic messages to look busy.

I’m not saying writing tools are all bad. What’s bad is wasting people’s time reading endless zero-thought messages, sent because sending them was easy.

Some people are not so good at writing, but if they have good ideas and positive contributions, it doesn’t matter at all. You look past spelling and grammar because it’s the intent that’s important. One of the smartest business operators I know sends short emails in all caps with no punctuation like a telegram from the World War 1 front. It’s part of his personality and I love those messages.

AI-camouflage now means now you need to hold more face-to-face meetings to see if the person you’re dealing with has any legit skills at all. Save time here, lose time there.

Larger companies love this kind of Warren-crushing uniformity. They think it’s great that everyone sounds like “actioning real time results-driven outcomes for key stakeholders”. Those businesses will enforce the use of that “sound professional” button, so everyone will sound the same. Because for a lot of corporate management, results are secondary to control.

 

Where middle-management bloat starts

 

The management world is divided into two groups:

1.People who have constructive ideas and/or turn them into working, profitable reality. This isn’t just people with creative job titles, it’s sales, finance, operations, customer service, lots more.

2. People who essentially get in the way of Group 1 with endless reviews, delays via calls for more information, playing “devil’s advocate” and so on. They contribute nothing, but are skilled at doing nothing risky enough to get fired.

AI message tools are very much skewed toward the work of Group 2. There is no “good idea” or “make shit happen” button. Just buttons to generate more blather that others must wade through.

If your ambition is the safest-possible corporate job, these are the tools for you. There’s nothing wrong with that, sometimes you just want to earn money to live your life. If you want to do interesting work or build a business into something large, you’re going to have to work harder at standing out.

Honestly if someone at our place emailed me, called me an enchilada and requested more zhuzhing of a plan, I would think “well here’s someone different” and wonder what interesting ideas they might have. I would go and talk to them.

After that I might conclude that they’re an unemployable clown but at least we explored it.

If someone sent me the Apple “the project may require some refinement” line, I’m not even responding. My first thought is: can we get by without this seat-occupier? It feels like the start of the middle-management bloat that helps a lot of businesses deliver worse product and lower profitability as they grow.

Standing out in a sea of slop

 

My plan was to finish on some thoughts on how to stand out in this sea of slop and automation. But it’s already longer than usual and the subject deserves more thought that I have space or time for now. It will need more zhuzhing, my enchilada friends. Next time.

And I do think Warren could be a useful team member in a different role. Give him a break, Apple.

 

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