AI Slop Is Not the Problem

All of a sudden, I found that most of the people I follow are just not interesting anymore. It’s not about the algorithm; it’s the content they post. I am sick of anything that seems suspiciously generated by AI, because it feels like they are not living in this world. The photos and videos are things I can no longer distinguish from real ones. Every single one has a fixed hook or clickbait to lure people into lifeless content, and I had to unfollow quite a number of them.

Why is this?#

This reminds me of how our lives are impacted by AI. Back in 2023, I was shocked by ChatGPT. It was so good that I immediately fell into FOMO. I put a lot of thought into this, and I could already see how good it would become at that time. I used AI to help me code before Claude Code, Codex, and even Cursor. Just a chatbot gave me such a huge productivity boost. Since then, I really couldn’t help thinking this might be the future. AGI is coming, in a way that we did not expect. Although hallucination is a bit strange, it is still quite impressive.

The impact from then led me to think that a big era was here, and that even my research field was almost dying, or that it would take a longer time to experience the paradigm shift. I quit my researcher job and joined a company to develop AI strategy, imagining 1,000 possibilities I could bring to the table with AI.

In 2025, there were two things that blew my mind again: video generation and vibe coding. They started to rise around then, and people who worked in production and software development were shocked at the same time. I was in both businesses. They forced me to think of another 1,000 possibilities we could do. Realistic AI-generated photos and videos, and an app built in one day, made me feel like I was super-powered and could do it all.

Now in 2026, agents are becoming another source of dopamine. OpenClaw and Hermes, people, including me, are building and configuring new workflows day and night, as if we had an army to build things. Not to mention, coding models and video generation models are even better now. What a year!

However, I felt something strange too. It is like a little itch that does not draw my full attention, but that I can’t ignore either. It keeps bothering me.

When I browse through my feed, I feel the distance between me and other people. This distance and non-livingness is exactly the strangeness I wanted to describe. I never felt like this in the past. People use more or less AI in their products: generated header photos in articles, generated articles, generated apps and tools. Don’t get me wrong, they are beautiful, clean, and good stuff. But I just lost interest in all of them. I suspect that I got high too often over the past few years, and now these things can’t make me high enough anymore. Or maybe I developed an allergy to AI and just feel sick when I look at them.

I can also see people who are impacted by it. Creators are super-powered with their content, but they have started to bullshit, or at least, they are not producing thoughtful content as they usually do. Instead, they use AI as a hook to attract people to watch. And people who make good content seem to post less, and it feels like there is nothing interesting to talk about anymore. Even crypto guys are not focusing on their narratives anymore and have started to focus on AI. A huge slop is not only what we prompt AI to produce, but also the fact that our mindset is no longer pure.

I looked into this myself because I am one of the people I described. I didn’t like it. The moment you feel you can do anything should not rely on the development of AI; it should come from yourself alone. That toxic dopamine rush, the feeling that you are godlike, is actually just you begging AI to be your god, so you can turn your brain off completely and obey. This is not what we hoped for, but I can see it trapping more people who rely on intelligence to do things, just like another type of doomscrolling.

Doing the right thing means stopping yourself from doing the wrong thing. Technology is not something we give ourselves up for in exchange for something less important. It is the gun in our hand to shoot the target with. And what exactly does this mean? An analogy is the first sentence of this article.