Blog · 2026-10-15 · baryreview editors

What 'AI slop' means, and how to make sure your blog isn't it

A word that stuck

You have probably used the word, or had it used about something you published. The AI slop meaning is intuitive: content obviously churned out by a machine, that nobody wanted, that fills space without saying anything. The intuition is right, but it’s worth being precise, because the term has a definition now and because the thing it describes is easier to produce than most businesses realize. Including, maybe, on your blog.

Where the term came from

“Slop” is an old word for mud, liquid waste, and food scraps fed to pigs. The AI sense grew out of online forums around 2022, mocking the output of early image generators, and went mainstream in May 2024 when the programmer Simon Willison wrote a short post proposing it as the name for a specific bad behavior: “sharing unreviewed content that has been artificially generated with other people is rude,” and content that is “mindlessly generated and thrust upon someone who didn’t ask for it” deserves the name (Simon Willison, May 2024). He did not claim to have coined it; he credited a tweet and helped it spread.

Eighteen months later the word was everywhere. Merriam-Webster named “slop” its 2025 Word of the Year, defining the new sense as “digital content of low quality produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence” (reported by Gulf News, Dec 2025). The American Dialect Society picked it too, citing its “widespread use for low-quality, high-quantity content, most typically produced by generative AI” (American Dialect Society, Jan 2026). Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary chose “AI slop” outright (The Nightly).

Notice the two halves of the definition. Willison’s version emphasizes unreviewed and unrequested. The dictionary versions emphasize low quality and in quantity. Put them together and you have a working definition for a business blog:

Slop is content produced at volume, without review, for nobody in particular, that exists because it was cheap to make rather than because anyone needed it.

The important word in that sentence is “review.” Slop is not defined by the tool. It is defined by the absence of a person who read it, cared, and had something to lose. An AI draft that a knowledgeable human has checked, corrected, and cut is not slop. A human-written post that was phoned in to hit a monthly quota can be.

The five markers of slop

When our editors review AI-drafted articles, the same five absences show up again and again. Any one of them makes a post weaker. All five together is the thing readers close the tab on. Use them as a diagnostic on your own drafts.

1. No specifics

The post is true everywhere and therefore useful nowhere. It says “choose the right fertilizer” without naming one, “studies show” without naming a study, “many businesses” without naming a business. Numbers, when present, are round and sourceless. The giveaway question is: could this exact paragraph appear on a competitor’s site without changing a word? If yes, it’s generic by construction.

2. No stake

Nobody in the article has anything to lose if it’s wrong. There is no “we tried this and it didn’t work,” no “here’s the mistake we see customers make,” no opinion that could be disagreed with. The author (if there is one) is not exposed. Readers can feel this even when they can’t name it; it reads like a brochure for nothing in particular.

3. No source

Claims arrive without parents. Where did the statistic come from? Who said the quote? Which version of the product has the feature? Slop doesn’t say, because the model that produced it doesn’t know, and nobody checked. This is also the marker that creates the most concrete damage: the invented statistic gets screenshotted, the fake citation gets found. A 2025 study by European public broadcasters that tested AI assistants on news questions found 45% of answers had at least one significant issue and 31% had serious sourcing problems (EBU/BBC study, via AIB). That’s the raw material your draft is built from.

4. No voice

The tics are familiar by now: “in a world where,” “it’s important to note,” “whether you’re a X or a Y,” the tidy triad of adjectives, the paragraph that announces what it’s about to say and then says it. Beyond the tics, there’s a flatness: every sentence is the same length, every paragraph has the same shape, nothing is surprising. Voice isn’t personality for its own sake; it’s evidence that a particular person with particular knowledge is talking.

5. No reason to exist

This is the one that contains the other four. Ask why the post was made. If the honest answer is “we needed a post this week” or “the keyword tool said so” or “the AI made it easy,” the post has no reason to exist from the reader’s side. It doesn’t answer a question better than the ten results above it. It doesn’t say anything the business uniquely knows. It is there because publishing it cost nothing, which is the dictionary’s “in quantity” and Willison’s “unrequested” at once.

Slop to substance: one paragraph, rewritten

Here is a paragraph of the kind we see constantly. The company is fictional; the draft is ours.

Before (slop):

In today’s competitive market, small businesses need a strong online presence to succeed. At Harbor Point Accounting, we understand that bookkeeping can be overwhelming for busy entrepreneurs. That’s why it’s important to choose a trusted partner who can help you streamline your finances, stay compliant, and focus on what you do best. With the right support, you can take your business to the next level.

Run the five markers over it. Specifics: none. Stake: none; nobody here could be wrong about anything. Source: nothing to source, because nothing is claimed. Voice: “in today’s competitive market,” “trusted partner,” “focus on what you do best,” “next level.” Reason to exist: it is a space-filler between the headline and the call to action.

After (substance):

Most of the new clients we take on in January have the same problem: twelve months of bank transactions, none of them categorized, and a tax deadline. Catching up takes us about three times as long as keeping up would have, and we charge accordingly. If you’re a sole proprietor doing under a few hundred transactions a month, you don’t need us yet; a basic bookkeeping app and one hour on the first of each month will do. Here’s the hour, step by step, and the point at which it stops being enough.

What changed. There is a specific scenario (January, twelve months uncategorized), a claim the business can be held to (three times as long), an opinion that costs them something (you may not need us), a concrete reader (sole proprietor, a few hundred transactions), and a reason for the post to exist (here’s the hour, step by step). Nothing in the rewrite required eloquence. It required the writer to know something and be willing to say it.

That’s the general pattern. The fix for slop is almost never better prose. It’s a person with knowledge putting a specific, defensible thing on the page.

How slop hurts a business

The cost isn’t abstract.

Trust. Readers are primed to be suspicious. In a Gartner survey of US consumers (fieldwork October 2025), 61% said they frequently question whether the information they use is reliable and 68% frequently wonder whether what they see is real; 50% said they’d prefer to do business with brands that don’t use generative AI in consumer-facing content (Gartner findings via DestinationCRM). These are stated attitudes in a survey, not measured behavior, and readers are worse at spotting AI text than they think; Bynder’s 2024 blind test found half of respondents couldn’t identify AI copy (Bynder). But the attitude matters even so: when a reader does notice a sloppy tell, they bring that suspicion with them, and the thing they were already half-suspecting is now confirmed. You don’t get the benefit of the doubt back.

Sameness. Every business in your category with the same tool and prompt gets roughly the same post. If your “spring lawn care” article is interchangeable with four competitors’, you have paid to become indistinguishable. What would have made it yours (what you see on jobs, where you disagree with the standard advice) is exactly what the model can’t supply.

Search. Google has been direct about this. Its spam policy lists “using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users” as an example of scaled content abuse (Google spam policies). Its helpful-content guidance says that “using generative AI to produce large amounts of text without manual oversight or curation represents little to no effort,” and that among the qualities it looks for, “trust is most important” (Google, creating helpful content). Google does not penalize AI content as such; it has said since 2023 that it rewards quality “however it is produced” (Google, Feb 2023). What it describes as abuse is, almost word for word, the dictionary definition of slop: quantity without oversight. We won’t promise you rankings; nobody honest can. But the policy risk runs one way.

Liability. The invented fact is the sharp end. Companies have been held responsible for what their automated systems told customers (Air Canada chatbot case, ABA summary), and publishers have had to issue corrections, retractions, and in one case a partial refund on a government report over fabricated citations (The Conversation on the Deloitte Australia report). A small business blog is lower stakes than a consulting report, but “we guarantee results in 30 days” written by a tool and published by nobody is still your promise.

The “reason to exist” test

Before you publish anything, answer one question in one sentence:

Who is this for, and what will they know or be able to do after reading it that they couldn’t get from the first page of search results?

If you can answer it, you probably have a post worth publishing, and the answer tells you what to keep. If you can’t, you have three options, in order of preference:

1. Add the reason. Put in the thing only you know: the number from your own operation, the mistake you see every week, the opinion, the local detail, the step everyone skips. One real paragraph can carry an otherwise ordinary post.
2. Narrow the post until it has a reason. “Spring lawn care tips” has none; “what to do about the brown patches under the oak in a shaded central Illinois yard” might.
3. Don’t publish it. This is a legitimate outcome. A blog with twelve good posts beats one with a hundred interchangeable ones, by every measure above.

A few supporting questions, if the main one is hard to answer:

• Could a competitor run this unchanged? (Specifics.)
• Is there a sentence here someone could disagree with? (Stake.)
• Does every number and quote have a link or a named origin? (Source.)
• Would a regular reader recognize this as ours with the logo removed? (Voice.)
• Did a person read the whole thing and change something? (Review.)

That last one is the one Willison was pointing at from the start. The difference between slop and an honest AI-assisted post is not the tool. It is whether someone read it before it went out, knew enough to catch what was wrong, and cared enough to fix it. If that person is you, the five markers above are the checklist. If it isn’t anyone, that is the problem to solve first, and it’s the one problem a better prompt won’t fix.

Run the reason-to-exist question on your last three posts. If any of them fails it, that is where to start: add the one thing only you could have said, cut the paragraphs any competitor could have written, and have someone read the result before it goes back up.