AI and slop: do they mean the content or the investment?

A degree of rationality is taking hold over the uses and limitations of AI systems as slop content helps erode the sheen of the new.

by Rob Corbidge

Published: 15:13, 22 January 2026

Having your creative work unexpectedly summarised is not a pleasing experience, as I can attest after it happened to me this weekend. Sending a first draft of a short and comedic story about Victorian dog breeding rivalry to my canine crazy partner in the States, she sent me a screenshot of it appearing as a summary in her Gmail - not having set her settings to prevent such default behaviour. 

"What is this crap?" she noted, poetically.

There was my 4,000 words pulled from my creative core, dehydrated by AI, and presented to her with all the soul, wit, silliness and humanity removed. Were my short story to become a classic of the Victorian dog breeding rivalry genre, I could see the only utility of such a reductionist function in aiding a disinterested student in 20 years time who couldn’t be bothered to read it but needed to know it just to pass a module or cite in a paper.

If you want to know the salient points of a comedic story, then you've missed entire point, salient or otherwise. Are our AI alphas missing the salient point when it comes to human creativity as a whole?

This past week has seen some AI wobbles, and some real-world use data that, while not popping the hype balloon completely, certainly points towards a degree of decompression.

Slop content hints at slop investment

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, warned at the WEF in Davos on Tuesday that public tolerance of the material cost of AI was not endless if there continues to be little to show for it. "I would say we will quickly lose even the social permission to actually take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens if these tokens are not improving health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private sector competitiveness across all sectors, small and large, right?"

I'd say it's worse than that. His comments come as a relatively small but important bunch of tech lovers - PC gamers - are now much more regularly looking for alternatives to Windows OS, with sector influencers increasingly discussing Linux-powered builds. 

Why? They're sick of AI all over their OS. Didn't ask for it, don't want it. These are people who by default are first-movers who embrace new stuff, so it's not the "shock of the new". They don't care about energy consumption, unless they're directly paying for it.

Then we have a new Deloitte report,  saying that 74% of organisations want their AI initiatives to grow revenue, but only 20% have seen that happen. Or a WSJ report this week revealing a dissonance between management and workers when it comes to AI applications, saying that "two-thirds of non-management staffers said they saved less than two hours a week or no time at all with AI. More than 40 per cent of executives, in contrast, said the technology saved them more than eight hours of work a week."

There are clearly productivity gains in some areas, and to set your face against that reality it foolish. But AI everywhere, all the time, doesn't seem to deliver on the promise.

Meanwhile, the boss of YouTube,  Neal Mohan, seems set to play both sides against the middle. In his annual blog post to the YouTube "community", he both signalled an awareness of the perils of AI slop on the platform (there's a lot), while at the same time announcing more AI features. 

Mohan (I hope) wrote: "Just as the synthesizer, Photoshop and CGI revolutionized sound and visuals, AI will be a boon to the creatives who are ready to lean in. This year you'll be able to create a Short using your own likeness, produce games with a simple text prompt, and experiment with music. Throughout this evolution, AI will remain a tool for expression, not a replacement."

The problem is volume, Mohan, old chap. The volume of crap that can be made using AI tools outstrips any human capability to match it, even if 1-in-20 such efforts might actually have some merit. As someone who uses YouTube as a primary viewing platform, it's been incredibly easy to observe the rise of AI mince attempting to replace creator goodness over the past year or so. And I won't even mention the AI ads.

New old heroes emerge

So then, what of the creative industries themselves, of which publishing forms a sizeable part? 

This week has seen Hollywood take up the campaigning cudgels in earnest, with the launch of the Human Artistry Campaign, trumpeting its tagline "Stealing Isn’t Innovation". Reduced in power though the US movie industry is, it still carries a great deal of weight at the lobbying and public opinion levels, something publishing doesn't do anywhere near so well at. 

It's also an entirely reasonable campaign, coming from the stance that AI systems are tools, there to augment humans, not replace, and such systems cannot be allowed to harvest human creativity for free, spitting out derivative content which the AI alphas falsely say bears no relation to the data it was trained on when it so clearly does.

"Big Tech is trying to change the law so they can keep stealing American artistry to build their AI businesses - without authorisation and without paying the people who did the work. That is wrong; it's un-American, and it's theft on a grand scale,” according to the Hollywood campaign. So far, 700 leading creatives and a host of professional organisations have joined it.

I have no doubt we will come to more equitable arrangements over the use of creative content in the medium term and we'll come to a more level-headed assessment of the abilities and limits of AI systems too, even as they improve. 

We are certainly out of the steepest part of the AI hype loop, and as acknowledged by the likes of Nadella we are now heading for the part where such systems must make money, or become irrelevant.

Like the cut-price versions of big name movies and musicians, if your AI is just a pale imitation of something everyone knows you are aping, you get consigned to being a bargain basement version.

While my future classic Victorian dog breeding pot-boiler may yet end up in the Dollar Store bins, I'd be elated it got published in the first place. I'm not sure Sam Altman or Nadella will get to use that line to shareholders or populations at large.