I scrolled through my Facebook feed for the first time in months last week. I was looking for a local Portland event listing. What I found instead was an endless stream of AI-generated images of Jesus holding improbable objects, AI-written engagement bait, and AI-generated "recipes" that would poison anyone foolish enough to cook them.
The term for this is "AI slop" and it is flooding the internet at a rate that should concern anyone who makes content for a living.
The scale of the problem is staggering.
Newsguard estimates that AI-generated content farms have proliferated by over 1,000% since early 2023. Amazon is flooded with AI-written books. Etsy has AI-generated art. Google search results are increasingly polluted with AI-written SEO content that technically answers the query but provides no actual value. Social media platforms are filling with bot accounts posting AI content at industrial scale.
The result is an internet that feels increasingly dead. Fake. Uncanny. Like walking through a mall where every store is a hologram and nothing is actually for sale.
Like walking through a mall where every store is a hologram and nothing is actually for sale.
This is paradoxically the best thing that could happen to real brands.
Here is the strategic flip that I am genuinely excited about: in a world drowning in artificial content, authenticity becomes the ultimate scarce resource. When everything looks the same, sounds the same, and reads the same because it was all generated by the same handful of language models, the brands that are visibly, distinctively, irreplaceably human will stand out like a lighthouse in fog.
Think about it from the consumer perspective. You are scrolling through an ocean of AI-generated sameness. What makes you stop? What makes you trust? It is the voice you recognize. The perspective you cannot get anywhere else. The imperfections that signal a real person made this.
The strategic implications:
First: voice is now your most valuable brand asset. Not your visual identity. Not your logo. Your voice. The way you think, the opinions you hold, the personality that comes through in your communication. AI can copy your visual style in seconds. It cannot replicate genuine perspective.
Second: showing your work matters more than ever. The brands that let you see their process, their people, their imperfect human decision-making will earn trust faster than those hiding behind polished perfection. Polished perfection used to signal quality. Now it signals "possibly a robot."
Third: community becomes your moat. AI can generate content. It cannot generate relationships. The brands with genuine communities, where real people talk to each other and create value together, have something no language model can replicate.
My prediction:
Within two years, "human-made" will be a premium positioning in the same way "organic" or "handcrafted" became premium signals in food and goods. We will see brands explicitly marketing their human creation process as a differentiator. And the brands that leaned too far into AI-generated content will face a trust deficit when consumers start asking "wait, is any of this real?"
The slop is a gift, if you are willing to be conspicuously, messily, recognizably human in response to it.