26.5.0 Writing in the age of slop
2026 is really the year of slop1.
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 weird2. But at the same time - It’s what’s helping us make sense of3 the world around4 us. However limited5 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.6
I’ve said this time and again - Writing is thinking7.
People think that writing - when you can generate hoardes of text with just an Openclaw/Hermes8 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 hand9, or by typing1011.
1: Although 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.
2: Sapir Whorf Hypothesis anyone?
3: Language shapes the way we think
4: A pity, really. Understanding the world is much more than descriptive notions. Buddhists would smile at this message
5: Bouba | Kiki is a fun excerpt on how limited and “quick-to-conclude” mind ours is!
6: If unguided
7: And perhaps editing is refining. Or in AI terms, fine-tuning.
8: Or even just plain copy-paste from ChatGPT
9: Writing by hand is still one of the best things you can do for your mind, and hand!
10: A tangent on “audio” prompting via natural language is warranted
11: I’ve always wanted to write a word or two about audio-books. Maybe this time around, I’ll write it. Just maybe.