Welcome to the slopification economy
Opinion
In a world of endless AI-generated content, being broadly inoffensive is rarely neutral; it often means being forgotten. The chief strategy officer at IAB UK has a solution to cut through the slop.
Spend any time around AI optimists, and you’ll hear that AI is ushering in a golden age of creativity. Cheaper production, faster iteration, infinite ideas at the click of a button, but the reality feels a little different.
What we’re actually living through is a collapse in the cost of making things, and that’s not to be confused with the effort required to make something meaningful.
The result is what I think of as the slopification economy – a media environment flooded with content that exists because it can, not because it should.
On AI Haven’t a Clue (AIHAC), the weekly podcast I co-host, AI slop comes up again and again. Different guests, different specialisms, same conclusion: more content, less impact, shorter shelf life. AI didn’t invent this problem; it simply exposed it.
What is slop?
Let’s be clear, slop isn’t synonymous with ‘bad content’. Some slop is fun. Some of it is weird, disposable, puerile and exactly what people want in the moment.
I have a particular penchant for decent slop and have whiled away many an hour doom-scrolling imagined MMA fights between (most recently) Victoria Beckham & Nicola Peltz, or being captivated by the latest Matt Reconstructs History short film on YouTube.
As we say in almost every episode, whether something is AI-generated or not seems to be the least interesting question. Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, and viewers and listeners will ultimately decide what’s worthy of their attention, regardless of whether it was made by a human, a machine or something in between.
The problem isn’t that slop exists – there has always been filler content – but when we start to confuse volume with value
One of the reasons the slopification debate gets lazy is that it assumes scale automatically equals failure – it doesn’t.
Take the podcast startup, Inception Point AI. On AIHAC, we interviewed its co-founder and CEO, Jeanine Wright — a serious operator in podcasting, having held senior leadership roles at Wondery and other scaled audio businesses. It’s creating 3,000 podcasts a week, powered by 67 AI personas that can operate largely autonomously, researching, generating, publishing and iterating content with minimal human intervention.
By any traditional definition, this should be peak slop.
And yet people are listening in their thousands and tens of thousands.
Why? Because these podcasts aren’t chasing mass audiences or vague brand-safe themes. They’re catering to highly specific, niche interests that mainstream media and most brands simply don’t serve.
How to be noticed in a world of infinite output?
Creators, interestingly, often fare better in a high-volume content world because they have clearer points of view. They are allowed to be human, opinionated and inconsistent, and algorithms tend to reward it.
Brands are usually built the other way around. They prioritise safety and consistency, which, over time, can lead to sameness.
AI – particularly LLMs – tends to reward clarity of voice, while many brands have gradually softened theirs through well-intentioned processes and risk management. In a world of endless content, being broadly inoffensive is rarely neutral – it often means going unnoticed.
Brand growth relies on building distinctive memory over time, but slop delivers repetition without distinction, wearing out creativity faster until everything looks the same. This is not a reason to retreat from AI; it’s a reason to use it differently.
AI amplifies strong ideas; it doesn’t replace judgment. Brands must move from making more to choosing better: fewer things, done with intent.
As content becomes cheaper and more abundant, attention, trust, and memory are what matter. Brands will not lose because the content was AI-generated; they will lose because it was forgettable.
Slop has always been with us. The challenge for brands is knowing when volume earns attention and when it quietly disappears.
James Chandler is chief strategy officer at IAB UK and co-host of AI podcast AI Haven’t a Clue. Read his regular column for The Media Leader every month.