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Slop Happens

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There's a new kind of bad writing running loose in the world. It's not the messy kind. It’s not the incoherent kind. In fact, it’s the kind that sounds…perfectly fine.

Suspiciously fine, even.

Every sentence is oh-so-well-behaved. The paragraphs balance nicely, don’t they? Kind of like the way humans behave when their told to smile for the camera for a big team photo.

And yet when you finish reading this particular kind of writing—AI Slop, as its affectionally been dubbed—you feel like you've eaten some kind of stylistic packaging foam with a hint (just a hint) of flavor.

That's slop, my friends: text produced faster…or to be more specific, text produced faster than real thought. You feel it, right? That illusion of fluency, looking so smug, standing in for genuine feeling.

Here are three sentences for you to take a look at:

"In a world where digital transformation is reshaping every industry, organizations must leverage data-driven insights to stay competitive."

"At its core, innovation isn't just about technology. It's about empowering teams to reimagine what's possible."

"Here's the thing: from ideation to execution, the journey requires both agility and intentionality."

Can you tell which came from AI, which from a corporate deck, and which from a Medium post?

Neither can I. That's the problem.

Nevertheless, you can find this writing everywhere now, right? AI-generated copy, corporate presentations, brand manifestos, dead-eyed LinkedIn posts, etc. I am certainly guilty of it.

This kind of writing spreads because it's frictionless. It's what happens when language loses its body and thus its real purpose. It’s what happen when we’re tired and need to produce more, more, more….

Why AI Sounds Like AI

Large language models don't have any literary taste. They have statistics.

They're trained on billions (trillions?) of text examples scraped from the internet and many other places. This means they naturally gravitate toward the most common patterns, learning what "sounds good" by averaging everything that came before.

The result is writing that is pretty shallowly perfect. When I asked ChatGPT to diagnose this writing, it said: “Writing that is optimized for coherence, not originality.”

The machines aren't trying to be boring.

They're just really, really good at being average. (Ouch. I don’t recommend you compliment a real human this way.)

How Slop Happens (in Humans)

But we do it too. The slop shuffle.

Slop is in no way a machine problem….not just a machine problem, at least.

It's more of…a repetition problem.

Lots of us humans produce it when we write for a certain kind of rhythm instead of meaning, or when we are reaching for a phrase that, you know, sounds right instead of the one that's true.

Don’t worry…one buzzword won't hurt you, nor will one overly stuffy balanced contrast kill your point. But when these patterns stack up (five, six, seven deep), the writing starts to hum at a frequency that's technically flawless and emotionally blank.

Perhaps you can think of these patterns a bit like salt. A pinch adds flavor. A fistful ruins the whole darn batch of mashed potatoes.

Below, let's take a look at some of the most common slop patterns.

Welcome to the (Buzzword) Jungle

Here are thirty words and phrases that cluster in AI-flavored or over-processed writing. They aren't evil. They're just over-farmed. When you see one, ask if it's doing real work or just filling in silence.

Systems & Abstraction: ecosystem, landscape, paradigm, framework, architecture, infrastructure, layer, pipeline.

Vision & Transformation: innovation, transformation, disruption, reimagination, frontier, next-gen

Soft Abstractions: nuance, intersection, journey, space, tension, dynamic, alignment, synergy

Corporate Humanism: empowerment, intentionality, authenticity, impact, purpose, growth mindset

Tech Speak: scalable, data-driven, automated, human-centered, generative, integrated

These are perfectly fine words, I suppose, but they are also pretty…empty. Why? Because none of these mean anything until you attach a specific noun or verb.

I mean, "An innovation ecosystem" is nothing really. If someone came up to you and said, "I had the craziest thing happen the other day! I came across an innovation ecosystem!" you wouldn't have any clear idea what that person means.

The Rhythms of Slop

But the bigger slop issue (for me, at least) isn't certain vocabulary but rather in the structure of the sentences themselves. Those mild-mannered, rhythmic formulas that try to simulate meaning through balance, contrast, or cadence. And again, one won't hurt you. Five in 500 words will.

Here are some common ones:

1. "It's not just X; it's Y." Ah, false contrast cosplaying as insight.

Example: "It's not just about data; it's about decisions."

2. "Whether you X or Y..." Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Feigned Universality with No Real Audience.

Example: "Whether you're a founder or a freelancer, this applies."

3. "From X to Y..." Suggests scope but, like a magician, hides vagueness.

Example: "From ideation to execution, we innovate."

4. Short. Long. Oh, no. Feel that faux drama. That sermon rhythm.

Example: "Consistency. That's what builds trust."

5. "At its core..." Essence statement that restates premise.

Example: "At its core, leadership is empathy."

6. "Here's the thing..." Very often little more than conversational filler.

Example: "Here's the thing: data doesn't replace judgment."

7. "In a world where..." I always read these in that famous movie trailer voice.

Example: "In a world where attention is currency, authenticity is gold."

8. "To do X, you must Y." Contradiction-as-wisdom.

Example: "To move fast, you must slow down."

9. "We X. We Y. We Z." Motivational cadence with empty cause and effect.

Example: "We build. We learn. We grow."

10. "And maybe, that's the point." Faux philosophical closure. A tidy little bow on a big box of nothing.

Example: "Everything blurs together. And maybe, that's the point."

All of these used together become the verbal equivalent of stock music. Elevator music.

Human Rewrites: Breaking the Pattern

So what is the goal of human writing in this age of AI Slop? At a basic level, I’d argue it’s to reclaim a certain kind of texture….restoring specificity and surprise.

"It's not just about data; it's about decisions."

Perhaps this becomes: "We drown in numbers and still guess."

"From planning to performance, we innovate."

Becomes: "We built it, then broke it, and then rebuilt it until it stopped squealing."

And so on and so forth.

I don't claim the above are great writing, or even good writing, but I think it's helpful to notice how the rewrites break rhythm, insert friction, and add detail. They read as human (or perhaps more human) because they leave room for contradiction and image. It ain't all about perfect balance and polish.

The Anti-Slop Directive

If you ever find your writing slipping toward that very slippery, synthetic smoothness, use this quick check:

First: Did I actually think about this, or am I just filling space? Every sentence should contain something only you could have noticed: a detail, a connection, a weird angle nobody else would think to mention.

Second: Hunt down any sentence you've seen before. If it could live in a thousand LinkedIn posts, kill it. Swap the abstract stuff ("ecosystem") for the real stuff ("three Excel files nobody updates"). Trade smooth balance for rough edges.

This isn't a matter of aesthetics or taste—not to me, at least—but rather something far more consequential: basic human trust.

Because when everything sounds the same, how can readers distinguish human insight from machine filler they themselves could scrape together on ChatGPT?

Let’s say you're reading an article about cybersecurity best practices. The author writes, "In today's digital landscape, organizations must leverage a robust security framework to protect their infrastructure from evolving threats."

Ooh…it sounds authoritative, right? But if you’re me, you can’t help but wonder: is this person actually a security expert who's wrestled with breaches at 2 a.m., or did they just paste "write about cybersecurity" into ChatGPT?

You can't tell. And that's the problem…the trust problem.

There is a risk in using slop that could be interpreted as: "I didn't care enough to think about this in my own words."

So OK, sure, yhey might have real expertise, real experience, real insight. But they've wrapped it in the same generic packaging everyone else uses. And so we, the readers, have no way to know if there's anything real underneath.

And what happens to bland writing? It becomes invisible writing.

The machines will continue to get better at sounding human. They'll learn our tics, our quirks, our contradictions, our weird predilection for em-dashes (OK, they've already learned that last one pretty darn well).

But I don't think they'll ever, you know, start writing something because they couldn't stop thinking about it at 3 a.m. They'll never cross out a sentence seventeen times because it didn't feel true.

That messy space between what you meant and what came out? That's where you actually live. Spend some time in there.

Because "innovation is human" means one-hundred-and-one kinds of nothing. Dig deeper: "The interns hacked a solution at 2 a.m. and it stuck."

Slop is predictable. Human writing surprises itself.

The Real Goal

This all said, I don't ultimately believe the real issue is us needing to sound more human but rather the need to sound way less generic. Way less packing foam/bubble-wrappy.

Good writing is not an exercise in arrangement. It’s attention. It's focus.

Every time you delete "At its core" or "From X to Y," you make a little more space for something real to walk in.

Bonus

There’s a great Weird Al song called “Mission Statement” in which he pokes fun at the sameness of all the corporate writing. It’s worth a listen!