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A developer sent us some information recently that was obviously written by AI. Every sentence made sense on its own. Put together, the whole thing meant nothing at all.
That is AI slop, and once you have seen it you cannot unsee it.
We are not writing this from a clean sheet, either. A good part of our own blog was syndicated content, published on dozens of other IT companies’ sites on the same day as ours. We have spent this year taking it apart. So this is not a lecture, it is a list of the things we got wrong.
What is AI slop?
Content that has the shape of something useful and none of the substance.
It is not badly written. That is what makes it hard to spot. The grammar is clean, the tone is professional, the structure looks right. It states the obvious at length, hedges every claim, and could have been written about any business in any industry.
Like feeding your business junk food. It looks like content and it does nothing for you.
Some signs, if you are checking a draft:
| Tell | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| It would suit anyone | Swap your company name for a competitor’s and nothing else needs changing |
| Nothing is specific | No numbers, no names, no examples. “Significant benefits”, “a range of challenges” |
| No position | Every point is balanced against a counterpoint. It never says what to do |
| Familiar vocabulary | Leverage, robust, seamless, navigate the landscape, unlock the potential |
| Threes everywhere | Every list is three items long, whether or not there are three |
Why does it happen?
Because someone pressed generate and did not read the result.
That is genuinely the whole mechanism. The tools are capable of specific, useful, well-aimed writing. Getting that out of them takes a decent instruction and five minutes of editing. Skipping both is faster, and nothing in the output looks obviously wrong, so it goes out.
As Dave puts it: people produce something with AI, do not check it, and think “there you go, I chucked it out, done”.
The awkward part. Nobody sets out to publish slop. It happens because the work looked finished. The person who wrote it was not being lazy in their own mind, they were being efficient, and the output gave them no reason to think otherwise.
What does it actually cost?
Two things, one measurable and one not.
Search engines discount it. Google has been explicit about content produced at scale with no added value, and pages that say nothing tend not to rank for anything. Worse, a lot of thin pages on one subject compete with each other, so a business that publishes twelve mediocre articles about the same thing can end up ranking for none of them.
Clients notice, and do not mention it. Nobody emails to say your newsletter felt generated. They just stop opening it. The same goes for a proposal that reads like it was written about somebody else’s project.
There is a third cost if AI answers your customers directly. A chatbot giving confidently generic answers to specific questions annoys people faster than no chatbot at all.
How do I stop it leaving the business?
Four checks. About five minutes on a normal piece of writing.
| Check | What it catches | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Say who it is for and what it must do, in the instruction. Not “write about IT security” but “write to a construction MD who needs Cyber Essentials to bid, explaining what changes this year” | Most of it. Generic in, generic out |
| 2 | Check every fact, figure and name. It will invent them and it will sound certain | The errors that damage you |
| 3 | Add something only you know. A real example, a number from your own business, a position you are willing to defend | The thing that makes it worth reading |
| 4 | Ask whether it says anything. If you could delete a paragraph without losing meaning, delete it | The padding |
Check three is the one that matters most and the one that gets skipped. AI cannot know what happened on your sites last month, what a client actually said, or what you have decided to stop doing. That is the whole value, and it has to come from a person.
Does this mean we should not use AI for writing?
No. It means somebody has to read it before it goes out.
AI is genuinely good at first drafts, summarising, tidying up and getting past a blank page. Used that way it saves real time. The failure is not the drafting, it is treating a draft as finished.
The useful framing: AI is a tool, not a replacement for thinking. It should make your people faster, not save them from having a view.
If your staff are using it and nobody has told them any of this, that is worth fixing before it is worth worrying about. Training beats a policy, and both beat hoping.
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So, what now?
Pick one thing your business published in the last month and read it as a stranger. Does it say anything only you could have said? If not, you already have the problem, and check three is your fix.
If you want somebody keeping an eye on how AI is actually being used across your business, that is an AI Manager. If you are earlier than that, start with getting started with AI in your business.
Frequently asked questions
What is AI slop?
Content produced by AI that looks finished and says nothing.
It is usually grammatically clean and professionally toned, which is why it gets published. It states the obvious, avoids specifics, and would suit any business in any industry.
Will Google penalise AI-written content?
Not for being AI-written. For being unhelpful.
Google’s stated position is about content produced at scale with no added value, however it was made. A useful, specific article drafted with AI and properly edited is fine. Twelve near-identical thin ones are not, and they also compete with each other.
How do I tell if something was written by AI?
You often cannot, and it does not really matter. Ask whether it is any good instead.
The useful test is whether it could have been written about somebody else’s business. If yes, it is not worth publishing whoever wrote it.
Should we ban staff from using AI to write?
No. Tell them what has to happen before it goes out.
Banning it moves the behaviour somewhere you cannot see. Four checks and a named person who owns the standard gets you far better results than a ban nobody follows.
Is AI slop the same as hallucination?
No, though they travel together. Slop is empty. Hallucination is wrong.
Slop wastes the reader’s time. A hallucination puts a confident false statement in front of a client. Check two catches the second, checks one, three and four catch the first.
Last reviewed: 17 August 2026.
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