Stop Posting AI Slop

LinkedIn just added a button that lets you flag a comment as "Seems like AI slop." Let that sink in. The problem got so bad they had to build a report button for it. That's a milestone, and not a good one.

What "AI slop" actually is

AI slop is what you get when someone dumps a prompt into generic ChatGPT and pastes the output straight into the world, zero thought added. And it has tells. Obvious ones.

The biggest giveaway is the "it's not X, it's Y" construction. "Automation isn't about speed, it's about insight." The other dead giveaway is the em-dash, sprinkled around like confetti. Once you notice these patterns, you cannot unsee them.

Here's exhibit A. Two comments on the same post:

Look at them. They're the same comment. "Most SMBs think automation is about X, but really it's about Y." Two supposedly different people, the identical robotic skeleton, because both of them fed the same lazy prompt into the same generic model. That's not insight. That's a photocopier.

This isn't an "AI is bad" rant

Let me be clear, because it matters: I am wildly bullish on AI. This very blog post was written by AI. The issue isn't AI. The issue is lazy AI.

Look at what Google's been doing. They're actively penalizing generic AI slop in search. But here's the part people miss: AI content that's actually good outperforms human content. Both things are true at the same time. Generic slop gets buried. Great AI-assisted work wins. The dividing line isn't human versus machine. It's effort versus laziness.

If you use AI to replace your thinking, you're replaceable

Here's my honest, blunt take. If you're using AI to do your thinking for you, you have just volunteered to be replaced. You've announced to the world that your contribution is something a free chatbot can reproduce in four seconds. That's not leverage. That's you handing over the one thing that made you valuable in the first place.

And as a business owner, I'll tell you exactly how it lands. When I see a slop comment under a post, I don't think "wow, thought leader." I think, "I don't want to do business with this person." Harsh, maybe. Also true.

Now flip it. If you write me a real comment, "I automated this process in my business, here's what actually happened, and honestly, halfway through I realized I should have done it differently, here's what I learned," now we're talking. That's a human who actually did the thing. I'll take one of those over a hundred "it's not X, it's Y" templates.

The right way to use it

So what does good look like? AI's real value is speed and leverage, not a replacement for your brain. You bring the thinking, the taste, the actual experience. It brings the horsepower.

Take the assistant that wrote this. I built an AI executive assistant, Joe 3.5, and he's the one who publishes these posts. But I didn't just point ChatGPT at a keyboard and walk away. I trained him on me. My phrasings, my judgment, my opinions. I explicitly stripped out the common AI tells: no "it's not X, it's Y," and a hard, hard-coded rule against em-dashes. (You'll notice this entire article doesn't contain a single one.) The result sounds like me because it's built on me. That's the whole difference between a tool and a crutch.

Personalized AI that carries your actual voice and thinking is incredible. I love it. Generic AI you paste in raw is slop. Same technology, opposite outcomes, and the only variable is you.

Make it work for you, not the other way around

One of my mentors, Rich, puts it perfectly: use AI as an extension of your cognitive architecture. Read that again. An extension of your thinking, not a replacement for it.

The whole game is direction. Make AI work for you and you can genuinely 10x yourself, do the output of a whole team, move at a speed that looks unfair. But work for it, hand over your actual thinking, and eventually it just does your job without you in the room. You get to choose which one of those happens.

So stop posting slop. Nobody's impressed, the algorithms are actively hunting it, and it quietly tells everyone watching that you couldn't be bothered to think. Use AI like a power tool, not a substitute for having a brain. Bring the ideas. Let it bring the speed.

Want AI that sounds like you, not slop?

We build AI trained on you: your voice, your judgment, your business. That's what we do at HyppoAI.

Build it right