You see it everywhere now. Under every article, buried in the comments: "AI slop." "This is obviously AI-generated." "Another ChatGPT regurgitation."
And you know what's funny? Half the time these keyboard warriors are wrong. The other half, they're absolutely right, but for reasons they don't quite understand.
I've been creating content for over 25 years. I've watched the tools evolve from basic spell checkers that couldn't tell "their" from "there" to grammar plugins that occasionally got it right. Nobody called those "spell check slop" or whined about the death of authentic writing because someone used a thesaurus. Tools are tools. They've always been tools.
But AI is different, isn't it? Except it's not, really. What's different is how spectacularly people are fu#king it up.
The Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About
Walk through any news site, any blog, any content platform today and you'll find it. That unmistakable AI boilerplate. The hyphes we never use. The needlessly formal language. The repetitive sentence structures. The complete absence of anything resembling a human thought process. The ai nonsence summary.
But as I reseach daily and publish to our platforms I can see that every single journalist is using AI now. Everyone. The difference between good content and garbage isn't whether AI touched it. It's whether a human being actually bothered to show up.
The lazy ones? They type a topic into ChatGPT, hit copy, hit paste, maybe change a word or two so it doesn't look too obvious, and call it a day. The result is nauseating. There's no voice. No insight. No reason for it to exist.
That's not AI being sh#t. That's people being sh#t.
Before AI, you'd start with an idea. You'd research it, test it against what you knew, sketch out an argument. Then you'd write the thing, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. Then came the real work: hours of refining, cutting dead weight, adding texture, making sure it actually said something worth reading.
AI doesn't replace any of that. What it does, if you're not an idiot about it, is accelerate the refinement bit.
This article? Like everything I publish, I wrote it. I sketched out the overview. Every idea came from my head. The structure, the argument, the examples, all mine. What I didn't do was spend three hours bashing keys and trolling through Google links to sites that contain content with an adjenda. Agonizing over whether a comma belonged here or there, or whether I'd spelled "accommodate" right, or if that transition felt clunky. I ran it through AI to catch the technical stuff, to smooth rough edges, to make sure the flow worked.
That's it. That's the collaboration.
The AI didn't write this article any more than Microsoft Word did. It's a tool. A bloody good one, but still just a tool.
The Real Question
So why do people hate it so much?
Partly because the lazy illererates, just like the spammers, ruin it for everyone. When you've read your hundredth article that came from the same soulless algorithm, you start developing antibodies. You can spot the pattern. The defensive reaction makes sense.
But there's something else going on too. People downvote articles about Elon Musk not because they're poorly written, but because they don't like Elon Musk. They comment "AI garbage" not because they've identified genuine AI slop, but because they want to feel superior. It's performative criticism masquerading as quality control.
And that's tedious as hell.
Getting It Right
AI is ubiquitous now. You'd better get used to it, because it's not going anywhere. The question isn't whether to use it. The question is whether you're going to use it like a professional or like someone who thinks Ctrl+C is a writing process.
Put in the work. Have the ideas. Do the research. Write the damn thing. Then let AI help you make it better. Cross reference facts. Polish the prose. Catch the errors human eyes miss after the tenth read through.
That's the balance. That's how you create something that benefits from the technology without losing what makes writing worth reading in the first place: a human being who actually has something to say.
Because at the end of the day, tools don't write. People do. And if your writing sounds like sh#t, AI or no AI, maybe the problem isn't the technology.
