Internet slop is the enemy of creativity, and I have the proof to back this up.

A little about myself: I have worked as a full-time freelance writer, designer, and overall media mastermind for the better part of my life now. Throughout this process, I have come to understand that the vast majority of content on the internet is slop.

Now, what do I mean by slop? Let's define it.

Slop is content that is mass-produced primarily to extract money via ad revenue, sponsorships, or affiliate sales and not to express ideas or truth. Slop is the enemy of creativity, not technology itself, as AI haters would have you believe. This content slowly floods our attention with low-novelty, manipulative ideas, trains those who view it to accept the mundane and repetitive as inspirational, and further confuses covert advertising and manufactured drama with genuine insight.

So often is AI cast as creativity's nemesis that those who are uninformed do not even realize the real threat that is right at our very border. This threat is how we choose to use tools and incentives.

Defining Creativity

Creativity, as I like to call it, is the accumulation of multiple truths to form a new logical conclusion. Maybe this sounds too pedantic for you, but I promise you there is merit to this definition. Creativity simply brings together lived experience, knowledge, and observation, and allows us to produce something that feels new once it is produced.

It isn’t new, sure, but it is a melody and a conglomerate of every single experience we have had as humans. As humans are incredibly complex creatures and each of our lived experiences is unique, necessarily, what we create is something that is creative.

What Do We Mean by Slop?

But what do we really mean when we say slop?

Slop is essentially mass-produced content that optimizes for profit. Now, don't get me wrong here. I don't believe it's evil, and I will expand on this later, but I believe we as consumers are vastly unaware of it.

The key traits of this content are that it's designed for click-through, watch time, and CPMs rather than actual meaning. It's often built from templates, whether that's reused content, fake content, or ideas that have simply been lifted off of other, more successful slop channels. This content is highly derivative and simply mimics the content of other successful slop. It's a behavioral pattern.

How Platforms Incentivize Slop

So how do these platforms—and systems—reward slop? There are many ways.

As someone with far too much experience in content production, I can tell you from personal experience that a large percentage of the content you consume on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and even blog posts is fake. It is polarizing, high-volume content that simply exists as a buffer for the real purpose of that content that you are consuming.

What I mean by this is that this content is often not created by those who have an incentive to make it truth-telling. Instead, the content is created by those who have an incentive to make a profit.

Slop Is Not Evil

Don't get me wrong. Most of the people who participate in this are not villains. They're just trying to make their own living. They are paying rent and optimizing for the results they need.

Because fundamentally, many of us participate in this type of content. We consume it, and because we consume it without knowledge that it exists, it benefits the creators greatly to create it.

I will be the first to admit that in my many years working as a full-time freelancer, I have worked for clients who create content that I would deem as slop. But the problem is far more prevalent than simply the production of this. The problem is that the environment becomes polluted by it, and the consumers are not aware of what this content truly is for. We're not trained to recognize it, and as a result, it succeeds.

The Many Faces of Slop

There's more slop content being published to the internet every second than you could imagine. Realistically, slop comes in almost every form.

Whether it's reaction YouTubers or accounts that have become huge by aggregating and reposting memes and jokes from smaller creators, often without permission. Or whether it's those bizarre, disturbing AI-generated children's videos. There are also synthetic stories or stealth ads like Cheater Buster, which is a very popular platform that has grown on TikTok through an affiliate program where ordinary users create highly emotional fake cheating videos.

Or even AI-generated listicles like “10 facts about X.” Or content that isn't AI-generated and yet is slop all the same: articles about dogs, whiskey, and boats that were written by people in an office somewhere far off — maybe even myself at one point. These articles are not written by experts. They're written by people paid by a content farm to pretend that they're experts.

Why Slop Is the Enemy of Creativity

Slop is the enemy of creativity because it redefines the norm.

The content we consume is mistakenly assumed to be genuine. Instead of being viewed as mundane fake content for engagement bait, it makes us feel as if it offers genuine transformation and genuine sources of truth. By confusing manipulation with inspiration, these stealth advertisements and fake organic content are simply warping our sense of truth until it blurs the line between personal narrative and a sales pitch.

For example, let's return to those cheating-exposed videos on TikTok. The amount of irreparable damage these videos have done to people's relationships, insofar as it reinforces their opinions of the opposite sex, is incredible, especially even more so because this content is so often taken as truth.

Why AI Is Not the Real Enemy

I've dodged confronting it head-on so far, but no more. Let's talk about AI.

I have seen many artists and organizations claiming that AI is threatening. Hundreds of musicians and thousands of artists will post and claim that AI will flood the world with infinite slop, making human creativity irrelevant.

But that's the problem. We don't realize that the slop is already here. And because of that, we are failing.

What AI Actually Is

AI systems are commonly misunderstood by their critics. They are simply statistical pattern matchers trained on massive text, image, and audio datasets and are powerful at generating plausible continuations. But these systems don't want, mean, or desire anything.

Maybe it's the fault of the advertisers who are pushing AI, who tend to claim that it will have artificial general intelligence in only a few more months, and then never deliver. And, as gullible as humans are, the critics of AI believe this.

But these AIs are not perfect, and they contribute ideas in a similar way that a tool would. Whether or not you want to argue this as true inspiration or creativity, that's up to you. But what remains clear is that a human using AI in order to bring their ideas to fruition is absolutely an expression of ingenuity, creativity, and innovation.

In fact, AI exposure often increases the diversity of ideas across study groups, because AI is making collective ideas more varied and more unique. Whether you use it as a co-writer or to generate a logo for your brand, AI tools are lowering technical barriers so people can execute their true creative ideas.

Creativity vs Slop

Whether or not AI is a slop content machine may be a concern to some. And this tool can indeed be used as a creation process to mimic many of the slop content machines that are prevalent today.

However, this is where I argue that the AI critics are behind the curve. The problem isn't AI. You, more often than not, are already being fooled by fake content multiple times a day.

That website you visited or that article you read? Odds are, it's owned by a large corporation that subcontracts freelancers at pennies on the dollar. Or that YouTube video you watched, or maybe that TikTok you watched. All of that content is curated and produced en masse.

AI is not the problem. The problem is that we already have a content problem, and people don't know how to understand it.

The Real Enemy

So what's the real enemy?

The enemy of creativity isn't AI. It's a misunderstanding and a lack of education. AI is a tool, and it can be used to create slop, but also to create true innovation.

Instead of targeting a tool that is used by those who create slop, we should do twofold.

Number one, we should target slop, not by calling it evil, but by pointing out that it exists. And number two, we should let the natural occurrence take effect, where people no longer buy the lies that they are being sold.

Protect your attention, your taste, and your beliefs. Don't just fall for anything you read on social media and actually research things yourself. That is how you will save creativity.