The Perpetrator Is Not the Tool

A better definition of slop points to feed control as the priority.

Last year I wrote a counter-narrative about slop (The Slop Scapegoat: AI). The prevailing narrative was that AI was to blame for a low quality content explosion. My counter was that AI may be an accomplice, but not the mastermind of this crime against our attention. Embracing the prevailing narrative would fail to reduce low quality content, because it had been a scapegoat it could not prosecute. More importantly, even a successful prosecution would only return us to a slightly less defective escalation.

The prevailing narrative achieved a definition land-grab. Today, I want to push back against the definition it established for slop. The Merriam-Webster definition that’s most relevant is “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence”. That definition reflects common usage, but a critique can demonstrate how we’d be better served with a different definition.

You might ask, why should I, a relative nobody, be redefining terms? Isn’t that the reason we have dictionaries and lexicographers? I suspect it’s not commonly reflected upon that this isn’t how we receive definitions. Dictionaries in the English tradition do not create the meaning of words, they catalog it. The term the dictionary writers use for this is descriptivism. They do not invent terms, but rather record language as it’s used by the public in everyday speech and writing.

In theory this is an organic approach, but it is vulnerable to steering. If a group wants a particular point of view to be supported by some terminology, they merely have to be first to the plate and use the term repetitively. If you want a dictionary to define slop as being particular to artificial intelligence, you repeat that a lot. Create a meme.

This is how we got the definition we have. A motivated group repeated their narrative. Like the best such narratives, it succeeds via its degree of truth. Slop creators embraced AI as a tool for their purposes. The omission is that slop predated AI and would exist without AI. The fiction is that AI content is universally slop.

The absurdity is that the narrative circulators often lacked familiarity with AI. They rejected it early, labeled it a symbol of moral degradation, and thus could not come to informed opinions about it without violating a self-created social norm. How was an ill-informed group able to pull off this coup? Simple, they had already seized the means of production. Most came from the realm of writers and journalists.

Now, to be clear, I do not want to overclaim. This certainly does not apply to all writers or journalists — maybe not even the majority. But enough such that there is a plethora of written low-information opinions, and little counter-narrative. For those writers who did not fall prey to this siren’s call, the defence never carried the appeal of the prosecution. And with many other valuable things to write about, the counter-narrative went unrepresented.

Why am I motivated where they were not? Partly because I’ve been the subject of attacks that stem from the original narrative. I do get stuck in writing at times. I don’t have a lot of editorial assistance. But I have ideas I think are valuable, and I find AI a useful tool to help express them. But the narrative holders offer a Catch-22. Use AI, and be subject to automated filters, low-grade negativity and the occasional overwrought attack.

What should we call slop?

I hate slop. I dislike most complaints about slop too. Ironic?¹ Technically, no — just like that use of “irony”, the root is about the definition.

In offering a definition of slop, I want to approach it in a different way than the lexicographers. I want to offer a definition that would be useful. Instead of accepting what has become common, I want to ask: what happens if we use this definition or that definition? Yes, this is the same steering I described above. The difference is that I’m doing it in the open and stating my criteria, so you can judge the definition by its consequences rather than by its repetition. I only offer this definition, rather than control it. It’s ultimately you who will determine its adoption.

The first consequence to consider: no matter what, slop will be a derogatory term. It’s very unlikely that it will ever be used in another way. With this in mind, our definition should avoid including things we shouldn’t think of as bad. A definition that’s too inclusive and lacking in selection will cause good things to be described in what will always be a derogatory way. This is why I don’t accept those lazy descriptors of “digital content” or “generated by artificial intelligence”. If these are core parts of the definition, my expectation is they’ll be dominant, and we’ll label many good things as bad.

In The Slop Scapegoat: AI, I described slop as “low-quality material created to grab eyeballs”. I’d iterate upon this and the Merriam-Webster definition.

Laziness

We should say slop is lazy. At some point, someone has stopped caring, and is avoiding effort that is appropriate.

This relates to “usually in quantity” from the Merriam-Webster definition. Slop’s harm stems from volume. But it doesn’t depend on one mass-produced source, it stings in the aggregate too. Many individuals following the same motivations add up.

But we can’t categorize by count, as we can’t count until we categorize. Also, many good things come in volume too. So, we turn to discussions of effort next, which is progress. I suggest laziness because there are niche examples of high-effort slop. This fits when someone is directing effort in a lazy way.

Manipulative

We should say slop is manipulative. It must have a purpose, and that purpose must be misaligned. You need a perpetrator and a target to have purpose and misalignment.

Usually it’s manipulative for the purpose of gaining attention. But I also see examples where it’s manipulative for the purpose of providing a veneer of competence. This veneer succeeds against shallow examination. The more common version, seeking attention, can be described this way: it seeks to gain attention by providing a veneer of quality. There, it’s no surprise that the veneer is later revealed, but after gaining attention, when the purpose has already been met. With a veneer of competence — an essay, say — the hope is to preserve it until the end of the examination.

Costs to the Audience

We should say slop creates costs for the audience. Laziness without harm we can overlook.

This relates to the Merriam-Webster use of “low quality”. This is a bit of a trap. Quality is hard to measure. At best, we estimate it, and how deep that estimation goes depends on the context. We often take shortcuts, and cut our efforts off at the lowest effort necessary to distinguish most high quality from low quality. You might say our efforts at assessing quality are a bit sloppy.²

Quality also pulls in low skill creations. I don’t want to start calling your child’s art project slop. They put effort in. You might turn that into slop by lazily posting it, and consuming the attention of people who aren’t interested. On the other hand, you might post it to those who are interested, or post it in a way that is interesting. Content can only become slop when it finds a delivery channel.

Ignore the medium and tool

The part of the Merriam-Webster definition I find lacking in usefulness is “digital content” and “artificial intelligence”. We should not focus here as they are distractions.

If I print slop, is it no longer slop? Am I not allowed to call a human that wastes my time with mindless actions slop because they are not artificial? AI content is not slop. AI content can be slop. Slop can come from anywhere, but you’re not wrong to associate it with AI, because statistically speaking it is associated.

Personally, I’m as angry with slop recruitment by phone call as by email. Recruiters often call me, clearly reading from a script, and then ask me four or so questions that are already clear from my resume. I know what’s happened here. An automated system has flagged me by a keyword match (yay me), but instead of having their employee put the effort into reading the resume, the recruitment company wants to fill in an online submission by having them call me, read the script, and force me to answer. They hope I’m desperate enough to put up with this.

We should call that slop too. It’s time consuming for me. It’s based on a lazy plan. It’s trying to provide the impression that I’m important, while they play a numbers game. They aren’t trying to help me, they are trying to lock-in a commission. It’d be less effort for me to submit directly.

That poor recruiter strapped to the desk making these calls isn’t the perpetrator of the slop, it’s the company leader that arranged it. They are merely the tool. AI can, and often is, the tool. But the perpetrator is not the tool.

When we focus on the medium or mechanism, we ignore the perpetrator. Focusing on the perpetrator allows examination of their motives. I suggest the motivations of manipulation and laziness as core.

The problem is when the tool is used to shift effort from the creator to the audience. That’s the third aspect at work. One such cost lands on the audience’s proxies for quality. It was convenient when you could recognize spam by the poor English and bad formatting — but spam wasn’t the only thing filtered by that proxy. Audiences should be willing to shift proxies; if a proxy has been undermined, it’s the only option. It’s also worth noting where the proxy failed: the shift isn’t necessary when something of value has found its way in, only when something lacking in value has.

The best example of slop? Poorly written articles, heavily SEO optimized, intended to attract eyeballs from Google searches. These articles require a certain kind of effort, but it’s not effort to serve the audience, it’s effort to capture them. We’re better off when Google is able to filter them out, or provide an AI generated answer, or highlight a definitive document. It’s true, that type of slop is turbo-charged by AI, but its prevalence predates AI. Some was human written, some was sourced from human content, then distorted by inserting ads, catchy headlines, and SEO optimization.

How this develops

I could make an effort to offer wording to replace the Merriam-Webster definition, but I’ll resist. I’d prefer to offer the counter-narrative, and for you to engage with it, push back on the current usage, and thus establish a new norm that the lexicographers can then capture. A new definition should be organically derived from that process. But as a summary: laziness, manipulation, and costs to the audience. Take those as the core, rather than the delivery channel or use of AI.

Slop Smells: How to avoid creating slop

The effort ratio

Is effort higher for the reader than the creator? Using AI to reduce your effort is fine. But if it reduces below the reader’s level, or even to less than four times the reader’s level, you should put in more effort. A proper multiplier is dependent on context. If your audience is one, the 4:1 ratio may fit. But if the audience is larger, your per-reader ratio should go up. A 1-hour presentation to a room of 50? Five to ten hours of preparation is a good floor (assuming they aren’t all multi-tasking…). A 2,000 word newsletter (10 minute reading time) to an audience of 1,000 or more? Two to three days of effort. There is a less than linear growth function here — no one expects the article read by 100,000 to take a year. It happens, but usually that’s the culmination of work, rather than the whole product.

The input ratio

In writing, a good sign is that you’re cutting — revising, rewriting. Your drafts should have cutting room material. Generally true of all writing, but especially true when working with AI. Be suspicious of cases where you use AI to generate output larger than your inputs. “Summarize my work research project from the last year”, or “Combine these three drafts”, is better than “Write an article on Shakespeare’s views on X”.³

Slop is in the eye of the beholder

The first two smells you can check yourself. Checking quality is harder, because quality is in the eye of the beholder. It is rare to align with an audience’s motives at low effort, but if you do, I would not call your content slop. The most probable means to do so is an intense connection to the audience’s motives. Some might call that taste. Be careful about arrogance though. Many a “taste-maker” has fallen for that trap.

It is possible to reduce effort without becoming slop. There is a minimum bound, but the boundary isn’t set directly by effort, rather it’s set by the need to align motives. If you have an idea you want to convey, and there is a high effort and a medium effort way of doing it, and both deliver something of equal quality to the audience, the reduction of effort doesn’t place you on the slop slope.

You land on the slop slope when your efforts to reduce effort start to degrade quality in the eyes of the audience. This isn’t a quality standard. Quality depends upon skill and effort, and anti-slop doesn’t need to punish skill deficits. Using a tool to compensate for something less than mastery is not the problem — especially when the tool allows you to put in more effort elsewhere to serve the audience.

Motivations

If you want to avoid creating slop, a lot goes to your motivations, but these heuristics can be useful for self-awareness. You do have a need to balance effort to reward. A fair audience should recognize good faith efforts at that.

Again, why should we care about the definition?

Because the definition determines what we do about the hardest part of writing.

Writing carries three challenges that should be important to every author: being clear, having something interesting to communicate, and making and keeping your audience interested. Communicating clearly may be the easiest, and it’s well covered elsewhere; I shouldn’t spend my or your time in that area.

Having something interesting to communicate is sometimes overlooked by both authors and audiences. Authors could overlook it intentionally, if they are writing for money: the employer finds the topic interesting, and the author’s interest is in getting paid. Or reducing further, the audience finds it interesting, and is thus the employer. There’s nothing inherently wrong with writing under direction, but if there’s two topics, each with an author interested in it, it’s best if the topics are aligned with the interested authors rather than the inverse. Besides the author’s satisfaction, an employer would generally see better output from the writer with an interest in the topic.

The third challenge is by far the hardest, most elusive, and most frustrating part of writing, in my experience. If you want to create an interest in an audience that didn’t already exist, you need to acquire their time and attention for long enough for them to develop an interest in the topic. Even when an audience is explicitly interested, distractions and competition for their attention demand finding ways to make an audience interested separate from the topic itself. This is the realm of psychology and all of our irrationalities, whether rationally irrational or randomly irrational. Needing to overcome irrationality will always contain an element of frustration. And the intentional use of irrationality is a form of manipulation, which even to overcome irrationality itself, can be frightening to engage in.

In addition, engaging in this last part alters yourself. Changing the style by which you communicate carries not just the frustration of investing time and effort, but the frustration that you might not like the final destination. If anything about that last sentence is unclear, watch any coming-of-age movie where the not-popular teen is miraculously added to the popular group and has a crisis of conscience from the after effects.

If AI is a shortcut through those layers, why should it be verboten? If it’s merely a competition, then any rules are valid. But outside of competitions, bypassing these layers is the price not the payment. It’s illogical to suggest that the ideas that should succeed are only those held or represented by the most masterful and efficient writers. Critics of AI, at least for the moment, are right when they suggest AI is less masterful than the world’s best writers. But it’s at least sometimes better than my writing.⁴ I’m still confident in my ideas, even when I’m struggling with the writing, and want to share them. These layers that connect with our attention serve as a rough filtering mechanism. But it’s very rough. The world’s best writers are not the repository of all the world’s best ideas. They have some of them, but definitely not all.

Bypassing those layers and getting the attention necessary to have ideas engaged with and evaluated is ultimately a good thing — unless the bypass shifts costs onto the audience. That’s the definitional line again: the shortcut isn’t the sin, the transferred cost is. A hollow attention or prestige seeking attempt fails that test; honest use of the shortcut doesn’t. And fear of the former isn’t worth the cost of banning the latter. There are better ways to do the necessary filtering, and AI detection is a poor one. While Pangram may have a low false-negative rate, what it detects doesn’t represent the truly important factor.

The Economist wrestles with the same question in Is AI writing taking over Westminster?:

That raises two questions. Is this AI writing a problem? And why the links to Mr Burnham? Start with the first. Politics is full of prose not written by the apparent author: politicians have speechwriters, intellectuals employ research assistants. Perhaps AI is no different, even if the prose is clunkier. But people setting out ideas in politics are asking for something quite audacious: to reshape how a country is governed around what they think. Any writer knows how much putting words on a page can tighten one’s arguments. Even subcontracting that to an aide beats skipping the (sometimes painful) process entirely. AI certainly produces sloppy prose, but it also papers over sloppy thinking.

Maybe that matters less if, as Ms Haigh and the “Productive State” authors say, AI is used only for a late polish. The trouble is that readers can detect whether AI wrote the final product, but not how authors used it. And when AI’s involvement is disclosed only after the press come knocking, trust takes some earning back.

The late polish is clearly different from the one prompt request. There’s also the question, is the document the output, or is the process of research the output? You can create a decent document via AI. You can learn by creating a document by hand. You can learn by working with AI to create a document. And there’s more than one way to outsource your thinking. Pangram understands none of that.

Is Pangram a good tool?

The gold standard in detecting AI writing today is a tool called Pangram⁵. Before Pangram, there was a question on whether detecting AI written text was feasible; it performed much better than expected, and its best performance number is a low false-positive rate. But Pangram has limits. A few are inside the tool: it’s not too hard to take a fully AI written piece and with some modest changes get a result stating 100% human written. And the false positive rate will only hold if you set a minimum bar — if you start considering “10% AI generated” as positive, rather than >50%, you’ll get more false positives than the published rate.

The real limits though are the context, because it can’t tell you what went into the writing. It can’t tell you anything about the originality of the ideas, and it definitely can’t tell you anything about their correctness or worth. There are a few contexts where knowing that the final draft was entirely human written is useful — an academic context meant to evaluate the capability level of a student in writing, where Pangram is a sufficient tool. There are others where it’s more questionable — writing intended to evaluate understanding of a concept, where surface level rewrites evade it. In both cases, you might wonder why you’re evaluating in this way, and whether you could avoid “cheating” by adopting a process that’s not adversarial. The purpose of mid-education evaluations should be to steer students toward more effective learning experiences. If you avoid introducing adversarial dynamics, students should be interested in honest feedback, which requires honest input. Save the adversarial evaluations for a context where they are actually important, and then invest all the necessary efforts to definitively stop cheating.

What about the context of filtering social feeds to remove slop? It has the downside of also filtering out non-slop that used AI in a final/late iteration. While I lament that, considering some of that is my own writing, I would have to admit that it will accomplish a lot of its objective in creating a feed that is, as a percentage, less slop. Until someone builds a better tool, these are your options. We shouldn’t be quite so gleeful about this compromise though. Slop will find a way, where honest AI-using authors may not. High volume slop may just play the numbers game: if you filter 90% of it, create ten times more. And human generated slop won’t be caught at all, and is still numerous and insidious enough to be a problem.

The real problem with feeds is that they do not even attempt to take our higher interests into account. The justification is a desire to not be paternalistic, but the fix is to give us control over applying higher interests to our own feeds. In lieu of the paternalistic “quality” driven feed, we’re given a “value-neutral” algorithm which is optimized for ad revenue generation. This isn’t a choice any of us would have made given a choice, so why do we accept being stuck with it?

Ad revenue optimized feed algorithms optimize for engagement time, and we’re fed the narrative that engagement time aligns with our interests: if we choose to engage, the engagement is a sign of our interest, and thus an engagement driven feed serves our interests. Nice narrative — true enough that it managed to avoid scrutiny until deeply embedded, but not true enough to avoid some serious downsides. Effective slop is the content that tricks us into engaging, while not fulfilling our real interests. Slop utilizes the tricks of engagement. If it’s high volume automated slop, it will optimize the initial words, adopting easy to follow patterns to draw in engagement. If it’s human generated slop, it will use those tricks, plus others: a pretty face, totally irrelevant to the content value; catchy headlines, “Ultimate Guide to …”, “Beware of this trap …”. Feed algorithms don’t protect you from this, they accentuate it. They “feed” on it. Each time you’re tricked, you get more of the same.

What you want is a focus on quality. Feed algorithms have a few signals that align with impressions of quality, such as likes and reposts, but these come too little and too late. Their weighting is too low in comparison to simple engagement, so what signal they give is overridden by the tricks that align with slop. And a lot of good content is already gone, having failed the first round engagement filter, never seeing enough views to gather likes and reposts. Some is left — enough to keep you from deleting the app entirely — but it may not be the best, and it’s certainly not all of the best. And there’s a lot of slop, for which you are the only filter.

We could do better

A pattern that is both predictable and understandable, but also wrong: when a force for change emerges that accentuates a long ignored issue, we react against the force, rather than addressing the issue. It seems easier to stop change than to engage in more of it. But this is a bad plan, as the force will win in the end. If you delay it, you best use the delay effectively, or when your attempts at delay inevitably fail, you’ll be worse off.

It’s not hard to imagine better systems than these feeds. I’ve got a collection of ideas. Maybe some of these would fail, but it’s unlikely they all would. What’s really surprising is that we don’t even see examples of failed experiments here. Ideas for better designs are so easy to come up with, it’s initially hard to understand why. The reason though, is that to implement them, you need a type of access that the social platforms are actively discouraging. That keeps them small scale and personal, and blocks their ability to spread. It seems unlikely this is accidental, seeing as its result is a preservation of the status quo that optimizes advertising revenue.

This should be our real target, and this is why you should not accept “slop” as being described as AI content. The narrative that follows that definition is one that suggests a quick fix of a Pangram augmented filter. That fix is only partial, and what success it has will only open a hole for new slop generation techniques to fill. The root system that optimizes for putting slop in front of us, and rewarding the slop creators, hasn’t been touched. The most likely outcome is a short-term win, followed by a regression to nearly the same equilibrium. It’s one more layer of adversarialism that brings negative side-effects.

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1. This would be an “apparent contradiction”, because the two statements appear to be contradictory, but in actuality are very compatible.

2. This is "situational irony". Systems to assess quality are of limited quality themselves. You might expect quality assessment to improve in recursion, but the irony is that it must degrade, as the assessment of the assessment must be even less thorough until someone just “feels” it. The sentence is just a pun, which I refuse to apologize for.

3. A situational irony that follows this entire story is that the prosecution conducted by the prevailing narrative was lazy, manipulative and cost audiences by the misdirection of a scapegoat. Under the definitional regime I offer, this prosecution of slop was sloppy itself, and undermines its own utility.

4. I'm tempted to suggest, if you disagree, send me a note, I could use a word of encouragement. But of course the situational irony here is most such notes would start by stating how low their opinion of AI writing is …

5. Another situational irony: Pangram itself is built on AI. While this alone isn’t ironic, as Pangram has many uses that don’t require full-scale rejection of all AI content, it is ironic to be adopted as a “must-have” tool by those opposed to all uses of AI.