How to Spot 'Slop' — And Avoid Making It Yourself

'Slop' usually means cheap AI-generated junk. This essay argues it's bigger than that: slop is content that feels hollow, and humans make plenty of it too. The author lists the warning signs. It repeats whatever is currently popular — think of movies that cast Bruce Lee look-alikes named 'Bruce Li' to cash in on his fame. It also has less variety inside it, so it becomes boring faster.

The clearest test is what he calls the swap test. Pick any detail and imagine changing it. In a good story, renaming a character changes the meaning of the whole thing. In slop, you could swap names, examples, or entire paragraphs and lose nothing — the details were chosen at random. Another sign is low information density: one small idea stretched across a long email or report, so you spend more effort digging for the point than the writer spent making it.

Slop also pollutes shared spaces. Employers once assumed a polished application meant real effort; now anyone can generate thousands, so a single job posting draws tens of thousands of near-identical applicants. The essay's sharpest example is the myth that 38 witnesses watched Kitty Genovese's 1964 murder and did nothing. A police commissioner's offhand remark over lunch became a famous psychology finding, then got copied into textbook after textbook — each author repeating the last instead of checking the source. Feeding on your own output, the author warns, is how falsehoods harden into facts.

Why care? You are both a reader and a writer now. If you use AI to draft emails, reports, or posts, run the swap test before hitting send: cut the filler and add one detail only you could know. The catch is that the checklist is fuzzy. Some repetition is just style, and some short messages are short because they are clear. Slop is a smell, not a verdict.