We do probably need to think about the reality that slop was a problem before AI. Here is a copywriter reminiscing about their pre-AI gigs:
The sheer absurdity of what I was up to—authoring thousands of words not to convey meaning to a human reader but to enhance the Google search ranking of various third-tier cybersecurity concerns—didn’t trouble me at all. That I could churn out corporate boilerplate so fluidly, and at such speed, seemed to me like a divine gift.
Describing what his clients were after, Kolitz says
what these clients wanted from me was not sense per se but evidence of sufficient fealty to the whims of the waxing machine god, whose proclamations a startling percentage of the business world had instantly accepted as unassailable, the emanations of an objective ur-consciousness that one ignored at mortal peril.
While the rest of this article is actually a lengthy description of the horrors of modern cash advance/payday loan apps, these introductory bits where Kolitz describes being replaced by AI are very interesting.
Slop-writing was already widespread before AI, even if it wasn't as trivially easy as it is now. Writing not for the sense of it, but for evidence of "sufficient fealty" is a very interesting way to describe it. Perhaps we are being a little too myopic when we blame AI for the waves of slop in which we now swim. We built the demand for vacuous and empty prose at least a decade ago.