The current conversation is all about AI slop. The flood of mediocre, undifferentiated, generated-not-made content washing over every channel at once. I get it. The volume is genuinely new. The phenomenon is not.
The internet has had slop since the internet had ads. Different decade, different tool, same shape. This is the short history tour.
The 2010s: the SEO content mill era
Before AI could write a 500-word blog post in three seconds, a guy in a content farm could write one in twenty minutes for five dollars, and an article-spinner tool could turn that one post into forty almost-readable variations in a single click. This was an entire industry. It had conferences.
The symptoms were unmistakable once you knew what to look for:
- Synonym-spun text. The cat sat on the mat became the feline reclined upon the rug. Run a paragraph through a spinner twice and it stopped sounding like English.
- Five-dollar content mills. Bid platforms full of writers churning out generic 500-word filler for any niche, by the hour, never to be read by a human.
- Keyword stuffing. Paragraphs built around a target phrase, repeated four times in two sentences, with no reader involved at any step.
- Stitched-together listicles. Ten Best Things For Your Dog, every entry a paragraph cribbed from a different source, no expertise behind any of it.
This was content slop. Different machine, same output: cheap, undifferentiated, produced to fill a slot where content was supposed to go. The point was never to be read. The point was to exist.
The backlink era
Right alongside the content mills came the link mills. Same idea, different end of the same pipe.
- Private blog networks. A guy would buy fifty expired domains, throw spun content on each one, and sell links from those networks for sixty dollars a pop.
- Footer link farms. Web designers would leave a Designed by credit on every footer pointing back to their site, and at scale that became a backlink farm. A few got caught. Most did not.
- Guest post networks. Every article was a vehicle for one link in paragraph four. The post existed for the link. The link did not exist for the post.
- Comment-section spam. Great article, very informative, check out my site at [URL]. The entire comment economy on small blogs was poisoned for years.
Same shape as the content slop: somebody figured out the algorithm cared about a thing, and rather than make the thing, they faked it at scale.
The agency-template era
This one stings because it is closer to home. For about a decade, a meaningful chunk of the small-agency world was running on the same handful of templates with the industry word swapped in.
- The What Sets Us Apart page that lives on a thousand small-business sites, with three identical points: Quality. Experience. Customer Service.
- The Our Process page that is the same six icons (Discovery, Strategy, Design, Build, Launch, Support) in every variation.
- The stock-photo case study, where the headline is the client name and the body is two paragraphs of generic praise and zero numbers.
- The homepage with the [INDUSTRY] noun swapped in. We help [contractors / dentists / coaches / florists] [generic outcome].
This is content slop with a service-business wrapper on it. The agency made a thing once, found it converted reasonably well, and then redeployed it for every client without doing the work of figuring out who that specific client was. It is not the worst sin in the world. It is also slop.
The visual cousin: Canva
The visual side of the internet has its own slop history, and the dominant chapter is Canva. I gave that one its own post because it deserves a closer look. The short version: same shape as the content slop story. A tool gave a hundred million non-designers access to design output, the defaults were good enough that nobody walked away from them, and a decade later every yoga studio has the same eight fonts and the same gold-on-tan color combo. The longer read is over at the Canva effect.
The pattern, in one chart
Once you see the shape, you can predict the next chapter. A new tool drops, the floor falls out from under the cost of making a thing, and three years later there is a flood of that thing made by people who had no real reason to make it. The thing is fine. The flood is the problem.
| Era | The tool | What flooded the internet |
|---|---|---|
| 2005-2010 | WordPress, free hosting | Blogs about nothing, by everyone |
| 2010-2015 | Spinners, content mills, PBNs | SEO filler, link farms, comment spam |
| 2015-2020 | Canva, Squarespace | Identical small-business flyers and sites |
| 2020-2024 | Notion, Linktree, generic agency stacks | The same five-page brochure site on most small businesses |
| 2023-now | LLMs, image gen | AI slop, the topic of every newsletter you read this week |
Each row was treated as a moral panic in its day. Each one is real. None of them killed the internet. The good stuff kept getting made through every era. It just had a louder crowd of slop to stand next to.
What makes slop slop
Across every era, the slop has the same four properties:
- Nobody specific made it. No identifiable human took responsibility for the output. It was assembled, generated, spun, or templated.
- Nobody specific is supposed to read it. It is not addressed to a person. It is addressed to an algorithm or a slot on a page.
- It exists to fill a hole. The point is to occupy the space where a piece of content was supposed to be, not to communicate anything.
- It is interchangeable. Swap it with any other piece of slop in its category and nobody can tell the difference.
Notice that none of these properties are about quality. Slop can be polished. AI slop in 2026 looks great. The issue is not the surface. The issue is that nothing is underneath it.
How to not be slop
The advice is boring because the advice is always the same, regardless of the era:
- Be specific. Generic content is by definition interchangeable. Specifics are not.
- Use real numbers and real names. Slop almost never uses these because slop does not know any. If you say revenue is up 38 percent and you launched in August, you have already left slop behind.
- Have a point of view. Slop is opinion-free by design. An opinion is the cheapest, fastest way to prove a human was involved.
- Address one specific reader. Slop is addressed to no one in particular. Real writing is addressed to a person whose problem you can describe out loud.
- Make the thing you would not want spun. If a synonym-spinner could rephrase your sentence and lose nothing, the sentence had nothing in it.
These are the same five rules in 2010, 2018, and 2026. The tools changed. The escape hatch did not.
The AI chapter
If this whole history reads as a setup for the AI conversation, that is on purpose. AI slop is the latest chapter in a long story, and the same escape rules apply. I wrote a separate piece on the design side of the conversation, including where I plant a flag, over at where I draw the line on AI design. The story underneath all of it is the same one I made over at substance over style: tools change, output floods, the way out is always to have something specific to say.
Summary
OG slop, AI slop, and every flavor in between are the same shape. A new tool gives a million people access to making a thing, defaults take over, the floor of the internet drops, and the people who care about being specific keep doing fine. Pick one specific thing to be specific about. The slop tide will rise and fall around you.