Writing in the age of slop

2026 is really the year of slop¹Although the existence of ChatGPT et al. and LLMs have been around for a while, its now that they’re used extensively to create content online..

I am fascinated by the surge of words that’s been taking refuge of our technical vocabulary in the last few years. A few that we’re all aware of by now,

• GPT (Supercharged by ChatGPT)
• LLM
• Vibecoding
• GenAI
• …

But the favourite of mine till now is,

Slop

Language is weird²Sapir Whorf Hypothesis anyone?. But at the same time - It’s what’s helping us make sense of³Language shapes the way we think the world around⁴A pity, really. Understanding the world is much more than descriptive notions. Buddhists would smile at this message us. However limited⁵Bouba | Kiki is a fun excerpt on how limited and “quick-to-conclude” mind ours is! that description of the world is.

Slop is a favourite, because it elicits a feeling - an intuition, that something isn’t as worthy as it sounds. Something along the lines of mediocre. Something that says - ‘Sure, this is poetically sounding, grammatically correct, and follows the modern mathematical and statistical principles of virality, but it just doesn’t mean anything worthwhile. Of my time, or cognitive energy’. And that’s exactly what LLMs will produce.⁶If unguided

I’ve said this time and again - Writing is thinking⁷And perhaps editing is refining. Or in AI terms, fine-tuning..

People think that writing - when you can generate hoardes of text with just an Openclaw/Hermes⁸Or even just plain copy-paste from ChatGPT agent makes no sense. But I not only strongly disagree - I go explicitly against it. It’s at times like this that you should be writing more. Either by hand⁹Writing by hand is still one of the best things you can do for your mind, and hand!, or by typing¹⁰A tangent on “audio” prompting via natural language is warranted¹¹I’ve always wanted to write a word or two about audio-books. Maybe this time around, I’ll write it. Just maybe..

And I’ve restarted my blog writing as of May 2026.