> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://bayesiantheory.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Usual Slopspects - URL: https://bayesiantheory.com/the-usual-slopspects/ - Published: 2026-02-18T12:16:36.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-05T14:45:33.000Z - Description: In a world inundated with slop, many are putting the blame on AI. The painful truth, however, is that the actual culprit is much closer to home. - Author: Gregg Bayes-Brown - Tags: AI Safety, AI risk, AI Slop, AI danger, AI, Elon Musk, social media, Newsletter, #Migrated-1791211413550, #Import 2026-10-05 14:44 One any given day, most of my LinkedIn feed is one of two things: AI slop, or people complaining about AI slop. The latter camp often gets starry eyed for the good old days of LinkedIn. This, however, is a fairy tale with all the credibility of an investigation into porcine larceny led by DCI B.B. Wolf. The LinkedIn of yesteryear was same as it is now. Corporate buzzwords with no actual meaning. Single sentence statements, prone to faux-gravitas with all the genuine gravity of a gnat. Thought leadership with the depth of thinking you’d expect from a lobotomised calculator. Slop – ie. low effort content that’s a facsimile of quality work – was with us well before AI. Where do you think AI learned to write LinkedIn posts? AI’s not to blame for Slopageddon. We are. [Subscribe now](#/portal/signup) ### Pass the bucket From writing through to television, the prohibitive cost of reproducing slop has prevented its proliferation. Quality has, historically, trumped quantity in the arts. However, with each iteration of information and communication technologies, this bulwark has been gradually eroded. With the arrival of the internet, the previous business models which rewarded quality over quantity were obliterated and the floodgates were opened. As a result, we have gone from a society that appreciates art to one which consumes content. This switch has had many casualties. For example, when Napster appeared, it was the harbinger of the death of album sales. With this lucrative income evaporating over the course of a decade, record companies had to pivot. ![Article content](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0b/06/0b06555c-e570-49f3-a2d1-3ff0d72f29c4/content/images/2026/10/5e45d8ab-f9a4-4c33-b42f-9b4978d8cdef_752x528.png) *Source: Global Music Report 2025 IFPI* With income now dependent on streaming and live concerts, labels spend an incredible sum to establish artists, hitting $8.1bn in 2023\. With such a sizeable investment, record companies need to ensure they see a return. This means safe bets – music you’ve heard before with a different wig on. They’ll tell you that pop artists write their own songs, but that’s simply marketing. More likely than not, it’s a guy like [**Max Martin**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max%5FMartin?ref=bayesiantheory.com#:~:text=Martin%20has%20written%20or%20co,chart%20as%20of%20March%202024.), who wrote Britney’s Hit Me Baby One More Time, Swift’s Shake It Off, and Sheeran’s I Don’t Care. Let’s be clear: with more number one tracks than anyone else bar McCartney, Martin is a musical genius. It’s also worth noting that Martin and the artists who perform his work create genuine joy around the world – I am a wrestling fan, [**so no rocks are being thrown out of this glass house**](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3G07NZs2v18?ref=bayesiantheory.com). But let’s not kid ourselves - he’s writing regurgitated slop that record companies know will sell. When you stick on a Sheeran album, you aren’t listening to anything real. Instead, you’re listening to Martin’s magical musical slop machine. In entertainment, the journey from sensational to slop can be found in the evolution of America’s favourite animated family: the Simpsons. When it first arrived, the Simpsons was subversive, satirical, and incredibly sharp - as was its contemporary South Park. Then came the copycat slop. Family Guy and its bedfellows was not subversive nor satirical. It had nothing relevant to say about society. Instead, the laughs come from unexpected swerves. Unfortunately for the Simpsons, audiences in their droves loved it. While South Park remains as biting as ever, the Simpsons capitulated to the slop Family Guy’s Seth McFarlane was serving up. Around the same time, streaming services such as Netflix were taking off. These new platforms saw their subscriber bases explode. To maintain their users, Netflix needed content. It didn’t really matter what content, they just needed a lot of it. While it is undeniable that streaming giants have produced shows of incredible quality, the vast majority of content was, and remains, lowest common denominator garbage. Increasingly, beloved franchises are being offered up on the altar of slop. Today, the Simpsons – along with Marvel, Star Wars, and many others – exist only as a regurgitation of what came before. ### The cost of slop The most egregious twist in this sloppy saga though is the death of journalism. The internet created audiences which expected to receive journalism for free. With a mainstay of its business model hollowed out, news providers increasingly turned to ‘churnalism’ – articles written at pace, driven by clickbait outrage, and sacrificing editorial integrity for any advertiser with a bag of cash. This move created two major problems. First is the society we’ve become without truly free press. While bastions such as Private Eye remain, many previous papers of record such as the Telegraph and the Washington Post have become little more than playthings for billionaires. As the business model shifted, tabloids such as the Daily Mail and Rupert Murdoch’s multimedia empire quickly dumped any pretence of integrity to chase ad revenue through mass production of rage. The result is the political and societal chaos we’re now seeing unfold. The second is where AI started to come into the fray: the rise of the [**Pay-Per-Click Maximiser**](https://bayesiantheory.com/meet-the-pay-per-click-maximiser/). Social media algorithms not only corrupted legacy media, but ‘optimised’ newer media too, prioritising dopamine-hits of slop over quality. Instagram influencers, YouTube grinders, and the conveyor belt of thought leadership here on LinkedIn – he says without any hint of irony – are all rewarded by emotive, reactionary content. In recent weeks, we’ve seen what happens when this all comes full circle. Not content with [**bringing about Skynet**](https://bayesiantheory.com/terminated-the-depressingly-inevitable/), Elon Musk has turned online harassment of women into a slop problem to which his solution was offering the service to paying subscribers only. This is the world’s richest man supporting the use of a media platform he owns to undress women and disseminate these images around the world for his financial benefit. This is what happens when billionaire-controlled media meets AI algorithms fed on slop. ### Mop it up Darth Vader isn’t using the dark side to keep Disney+ subscribers. Ed Sheeran doesn’t abduct an audience for his concerts. Piers Morgan doesn’t force people to watch him shout at a vegan sausage roll. We have voted for slop with our attention and our wallets; we’re all culpable here. And let’s be entirely honest - we all love a little slop. AI is just amplifying our desire. Previously, it took at least some modicum of effort to make slop, but AI has removed the wafer thin blocker the internet left behind. Were you so inclined, you too could become the next Slop King of TikTok. You wouldn’t need experience - you wouldn’t even need that much spare time. You could be serving up slop into the eyeballs of TikTokkers by dinner time. The barrier to slop is now a ChatGPT account and a bad attitude. That said, the same AIs turning your LinkedIn feed into a wasteland can make something genuinely good. At every stage of the journey, from the very first writing through the printing press to now, the lineage of technologies of which AI is a part have been used to make both slop and masterpieces. As the infamous ‘95% of AI pilots fail’ MIT report states: the difference maker is our approach. Behind every piece of slop – AI-generated or otherwise – is a human capable of free will. While slop will always be a part of our culture, we as both consumers and as creatives can aspire to and demand a return to quality over quantity if we so desire. Making this happen is not something AI can do, however. The responsibility lies with us. --- Thanks for reading. I’ll be publishing a guide on how to write with AI effectively later this week – be sure to subscribe if you want to receive it. Although to be clear, AI did not write this, I did. In the meantime, please do like, share and comment as this helps get my own brand of slop in people’s eyeballs.