Once you spend any decent amount of time conversing with LLMs, you start to notice the slop in every facet of daily life. You open up TikTok and every other video is scripted with AI. Subscribe to a mailing list and the copy is generated by AI. You can’t escape it.

Don’t get me wrong, I use Codex almost daily in my work as a software engineer, but coding somehow feels different? I think it’s the “logical” nature of coding. There are many ways to achieve the same result, but you can test whether it works or not provided you write good tests. It doesn’t need to be creative. Users aren’t joining your platform or using your product because the quality of the code they never see, but the code underneath still needs to be correct, safe, and reliable.

I’m also yet to see an LLM that’s good at design or just UX in general. Using products that have clearly been designed by AI is agonising. Anything user-facing still needs a human with judgement guiding it, so I still have a job for now. At least until a threshold is reached where users simply do not give a shit about how usable a product is, and maybe we’re already there.

It’s something I worry about though, especially as a user of these products and services that have been built largely by AI. It feels like the enshittification of the internet is only accelerating. With anyone able to now build literally anything, how do I know who I’m trusting with my private data? Is there a company behind the product with people responsible for its security, GDPR compliance, and privacy obligations, or is it a slopreneur who just wants to make a bit of money? It’s hard to tell the difference lately because everyone is using the same tools to build stuff, even the big guys, and it all looks the same.

It’s all about trust, and I think LLMs are making it harder to trust literally anything these days. If I can immediately tell you used AI to write your script on a topic, how can I trust that you actually verified your claims or at the very least, even know what the fuck you’re talking about? How can I trust your product won’t leak my private data? It’s making me increasingly wary of using or consuming anything digital. Even the books I want to read now have to be filtered by their publication date with anything written after 2023 probably being a no-go, and that’s a fucking shame man.

Not trusting the internet has always been a thing, and I still remember when Wikipedia was demonised when I was at school. You don’t need a license to be a developer so shitty code that leads to data leaks has always been possible. Photoshop has existed for a long time and fake images were a thing before all this really took off anyway.

It’s just the scale and rate of things being pumped out that’s insane.

We already consume more than we need to, both digitally and physically. Companies get away with producing more than we will ever need, and then produce a bunch of content convincing us to buy their products, only for them to end up in landfill when their next shiny thing comes along. We keep slurping it up so they keep producing more. Gen AI has removed a lot of friction from that cycle, mainly around the marketing side. Even Samsung can market a product to filmmakers without showing a single filmmaker using it. They don’t even care who they’re marketing to now, so long as the generated person in the ad looks a bit like a filmmaker, it’s fair game. Pure overconsumption profit-margin-maxxing insanity.

I do get it to some degree though. Companies are trying to do more with less, so their employees are being pushed down this path. They have less time to care about the accuracy or even consider what it is they’re producing, they just need to make more of it, and fast. People do not get paid enough, so a small business already under financial strain may not be able to afford to hire a graphic designer which only worsens the problem. The economy is in shambles and the cycle continues.

However, using these tools so much strips away all the things that make me care about you or your product. It strips away the taste, the judgement, the knowledge, the very things I’m coming to you for. Even worse is how everything just ends up looking and sounding the same. It’s the reason you can instantly tell something has been generated, because everyone is generating the same things, over and over. It’s draining.

Every time I see an eyebrow in caps with wide tracking, every time I hear or read stacked negations or vague endorsements, I just want to close my laptop and move to a cabin in the woods where I never have to see it ever again.

I like seeing human-made things. Things that took judgement and care and attention to detail. Things that I know you actually used your damned brain for. There’s a time and place for slop when it really doesn’t matter, but it does not need to be the norm.