Some weeks ago I was working on a a proposal and a writer sent me a deck with early ideas. I opened the deck ready to feel inspired by honest thinking full of potential but then… I was smacked in the face by slop.
Everything in that deck was all one hundred percent produced in ChatGPT and shamelessly copy-pasted (em dashes and all). Then I read the email the deck was attached to and I noticed it was too long, too proper, too bland, and too empty so it seemed I had been hit by shameless work slop twice. Or maybe not, maybe it was written by a LinkedIn heavy user but then I thought, what is the difference between a LinkedIn fan and ChatGPT? Does it matter? Should I get offended by AI-slop and be fine with human slop?
The value of quantity
Here is a list of brand platitudes I have collected over the years that work like magic words to design-code oneself as a status brander:
Bold, inclusion, diversity, personal, belonging, for all, inviting, taking risks, challenge convention, leadership, simplicity, clarity, safety, meaning, experience, community, emotion, our practice, authentic, synergetic, physicality, human first, redefine, clarity, workshops, rethink, moving away from tools, stand out, tactile, experimentation, investigation, materialise, strategic, expression, prioritise, approach, compelling, awareness, purpose, research, solving problems, refine, avoid safe, expressive, serve, human, global, forefront, iconic, elevate, transformation, care, play, change, push, by design, natural, permeate, function, platform, change, humility, future, progressive, useful, for humans, break boundaries, innovative, looking back, contrarian bets, setting the cultural context, marketing vehicle, conviction.
I took this list of magic design words, fed them to ChatGPT and asked for a case study for a fictional coffee brand called “Drip Society” (name that I also chatgeepeteed by the way) and here is what I got in 3 seconds:
Drip Society, a Shoreditch café born in 2025, needed a brand identity that reflected its bold attitude and inclusive spirit. Our task was to design a system that stood out in a saturated market while staying human, personal, and authentic.
Our practice began with workshops to rethink what a café brand could represent. Rather than tools or trends, we focused on experience, community, and belonging. The research phase revealed a clear opportunity: most cafés chased minimalism, but few offered emotion or meaning. Drip Society would change that.
The wordmark was built around movement and flow, echoing the physicality of coffee itself. Its curved forms feel expressive yet simple. A palette of graphite, warm white, and copper conveys both clarity and depth. Every touchpoint, from packaging to signage, was treated as tactile and inviting.
Typography combined a grounded sans serif with a soft serif accent, balancing clarity and experimentation. This duality framed Drip Society as confident but never corporate, expressive without noise.
Strategically, the identity became a platform for inclusion, diversity, and care. It avoids safe aesthetics and instead embraces play, materiality, and awareness. Every choice aimed to elevate the everyday ritual of coffee into something purposeful and human first.
The result is a compelling, progressive identity that captures leadership through simplicity and meaning. By design, Drip Society redefines café branding for the future: bold, clear, and deeply human.
Don’t ask if it is good (because it is not) but ask if it is on par with 80% of case studies you have read online and yes, it is on par. So what is the value of quantity?
There was a time when being a smooth talker who could spit out good sounding consultant non-sense had a lot of value but, today it is just human slop. The longer a text is, the higher the chance it will be AI summarised and ignored. And what is long? Two paragraphs. More than two paragraphs will always be suspected of being AI generated.
Artisanal slop and automated slop are both slop
Something becomes slop once you understand the formula that produced it but you don’t need a machine to produce slop, you just need a formula.
B movies were artisanal slop, cheap operas were slop, chivalric stories were slop too and Don Quijote got sloped hard. Slop churned out by hand is still slop and has the same effects. Were the drawings in the Chauvet Cave neolithic slop? In their time they probably were.
But slop has a positive side, industrial slop tends to accidentally pay unique creators to do their thing so, for each river of slop you get a couple of David Lynches. But don’t get too carried away, even good art is also slop (most of Dario Argento is slop).
Everything is mostly slop but, does it matter if it is artisanal slop or automated slop?
Everybody pretends
I think AI generation works like doom scrolling and dirty pictures. We pretend to read poetry in our free time but we know we doom scroll and look at dirty pictures in private. We pretend to hate slop in public but we consume and generate slop in private (and we know everybody else does the same).
So now that we have stablished that slop is old, that artisanal slop and automated slop are both slop, that almost everything is slop, and that we are all guilty of consuming and producing slop, let’s go back to work slop.
To slop or not to slop?
I was thinking all of this while sitting in front of that AI generated slop deck. I was dumbfounded but I had to do something. Should I ask an LLM to reword it? Should I do nothing? Should I slop it myself?
At the end I redid everything by hand and with good intentions because I am an idiot. I reworded it, I reduced adjectives by 90%, I forced it to take a stance on something, and I did it all knowing the client will probably AI summarise it thinking that I Chatgepiteed it because everybody else does.
If you are human and still reading this, hi. What should we do my fellow bipedal consumer unit? Join the automated slop economy or rebel against it? Join the slop carrousel and prompt all of our outputs? Or pretend it is all fine and take a stand for artisanal slop? Or worse, pretend to take a stand and slop it in private?
Whatever we do, it will be fed as training data, summarised, monetised, and assumed to be slop so… I don’t know, do whatever, but for the love of God, at least pretend you half wrote it and don’t send me raw geepitee slop.