The longer I think about AI slop, the more I might just ask for seconds.
A few days ago I wrote about how OpenAI's AgentKit and Microsoft's Agent Framework are about to flood the market with generic AI agents. Everyone can build one in minutes. The slop tsunami is coming.
But I keep thinking about this.
What if slop is exactly how humans figure things out?
We don't innovate through careful planning. We innovate through mass experimentation, most of which fails spectacularly.
The pattern keeps repeating:
Early web (1995-2000): GeoCities pages with blinking text and auto-playing MIDI files. Absolute garbage. But that chaos taught a generation how the web worked and created the literacy for Web 2.0.
App Store gold rush (2008-2012): 10,000 fart apps and flashlight clones. VCs called it a waste. But developers learned mobile patterns through rapid iteration. That "slop era" gave us Uber, Instagram, and modern mobile computing.
YouTube's early years (2005-2008): Mostly terrible home videos and poorly edited vlogs. But democratizing video creation built the creator economy and changed media forever.
The printing press (1450s-1500s): Suddenly everyone could publish. The market flooded with religious tracts, political rants, and pseudoscience. Critics called it information chaos. It enabled the Reformation and the Enlightenment.
The pattern: When barriers to creation drop, quality crashes. But mass experimentation reveals what's actually possible.
Maybe AI slop serves the same purpose:
Thousands of mediocre AI agents will teach users what to expect and demand from AI. Developers will rapidly test patterns without multi-year commitments. The failures teach us what works. AI literacy gets built at scale.
The slop era creates the conditions for what comes next.
Here's what's different about AI though:
Web slop, app slop, video slop - those were humans experimenting with new creative tools. AI slop is machines generating variations on patterns.
Is that the same kind of generative chaos? Or are we just automating mediocrity at scale?
I don't know yet.
But historically, every time we've panicked about "too much low-quality content flooding the market," it turned out to be the necessary foundation for the next breakthrough.
Maybe we're not drowning in slop. Maybe we're in the messy middle of figuring out what AI is actually good for.
The Enlightenment didn't come from restricting who could publish. It came from letting everyone publish, then learning to tell good ideas from bad ones.
Maybe that's where we are with AI. The literacy comes after the slop, not instead of it.
Or maybe I'm just rationalizing because the slop is already here and there's no stopping it.
What do you think - necessary chaos or just chaos?