‘Sloppy’ has never been a good word.

To whatever it adjectively attaches is diminished with the speed its six letters could never hope to achieve. Dali-shaped and smelling like closed window cabbage and laundry, ‘sloppy’ has the colour of Pantone 448 C and the deft hand of a toddler.

Sloppy joes are for comfort not style; and completely interchangeable whether it’s for wearing or wolfing down American-style, ground meat saucy stuff in a burger bun.

Either way, it ain’t pretty.

The closest ‘sloppy’ might ever have been not exactly pretty, but certainly highly appealing  –  was as the Key West bar frequented by Ernest Hemingway. The story goes that it was this masterful writer who renamed the former ‘Silver Slipper’ that served nickel beer and dime gin shots ‘Sloppy Joe’s’ the day Prohibition was repealed in December, 1933. It wasn’t completely random: his Conch mate and fishing buddy Joe Russell owned the joint, ran it as a speakeasy and had been Papa Hemingway’s access to bootleg whiskey.

Were that all it took to write in a way where pages speak, and attention is as leashed as an owned dog in new surrounds with rhythm and phrases and subtext that star and stick long after, I would indeed be ordering booze by the case.

Which I may very well soon be doing for completely different reason. To numb to the tidal wave of AI slop where truth and fact are swilled and splashed and muddied like the fourth day of a music festival, and third day without a tent.

“AI slop” is Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year for 2025 – which is rather disconcerting for a dictionary with it being two words, not one. Is that slop slopping all over itself?

Whatever it is, it’s far from good.

Stop thinking this article requires too much reading and with no sub-headings to skim you’re not sure you’ll finish it

AI slop is low, low quality content  –  despite its definition including “mid quality”  –  it’s not. It consists of images, video, audio, text or a sloppy sludge of two or more, created by tools with no regard for accuracy but access to AI tools. Like eating the wet cardboard wretchedness of something Subway next to a Reject Shop discount bin, we’re standing in the middle of it’s tasteless, embarrassing, and useless existence.

There’s the strong claim that it’s cheap to produce  –  and you need to ask the planet about that. Like everything about AI slop, it nuzzles truth in the same way the misnomer of the Champawat Tiger (in fact a 10-12-year old tigress) did to the torn garments of all that remained of her human quarry.

To be fair, her prowess, stealth and incredibly intelligent observation of the Nepalese and Indian villagers she ate deserves recognition.

With a hunter’s shot that broke her upper right canine in half and took the ipsilateral one to the bone, the ability to bring down large natural prey was permanently lost. What was retained was her drive to survive and the opportunistic predation of a Bengal tigress. She adjusted her survival strategy to even hunt during the day. For seven years, honed in on something smaller, slower, and easier and thrived.

It was a situation created by one human with many, many others paying the price. Seems familiar, doesn’t it.

Believe nothing, but nothing about the low cost of AI slop. Everything on the internet carries a high price.

Every click of communication, research, shopping, entertainment, banking – everything – negatively impacts the environment with a carbon footprint that’s staggering. And yes, that is the unavoidable echo of cognitive dissonance with the pot calling out the kettle here. Whatever the kilohertz, we hear it all the time in the white noise of navigating the 21st century. What makes AI slop detestable is the muckers of it place their sludge as clickbait earners or to simply muddy the waters of fact.

American Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001), a scholar of both computer science and cognitive psychology, was also an early pioneer of AI. In 1971 he said:

“…[I]n an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

Seriously. Consider how much mind-Maccas is eaten every day and decide whether, on your deathbed, you’ll know it had all been worth it

It was the first time the economic importance of attention had been articulated about information systems – which equally applies to any situation with a profusion of information. Made well before an entire other batch of digital connectedness developed; and way before it was unheard of for a child to use a tablet or adult’s phone for entertainment from the age of 2.

Herb Simon’s observation is more relevant almost sixty years on, in a digital world that not only never stops, there’s exponential momentum on its road to never-will.

Users’ attention is a scarcity. Spread across the vastness of cyberspace and all its worlds, there’s fierce competition for site attention. It’s a commodity of enormous value when it’s converted into sales; and every online household on the planet has only a finite amount of it. Basically, the game is get as much of it as possible; at, as we already know, any cost.

Generative AI is essentially a vanity project that’s making us vain enough to want it. Algorithms know more about our behaviours than we give ourselves time to even contemplate. What doesn’t fit particular parameters is allocated other data subsets and fed back to us – whether accurate or not. Not unlikened to revisiting your own vomit.

AI slop is someone else’s vomit that they make everyone else look at while they’re vomiting somewhere else. Ad nauseam, ad infinitum.

If You Don’t Have Another 4 Minutes To Finish Reading This, Any Perceived Judgment Is Coming From Somewhere Else

Sydney’s most entertaining AI slop display was on line analogue – a poster at a train station. And maybe a good name for a band. Redfern station generated Australian Christmas artwork for its usual yuletide banner, and it caused such a ruckus it had to be removed faster than a discount price tag on a prezzie.

It was AI at its best. Santa in sunnies relaxing on an unfinished deckchair, a large cocktail with a gravity-defying lime wedge garnish in his red-gloved hand; an indefinable bucket of objects by his deformed foot. The engineering of his thongs is as improbable as the figure in the water wearing what could be a trench coat, and the fakery of fauna that surrounds him.

It’s a Christmas cracker!

A c-cup kanga in a bikini top is more than bizarre: and yet true to the level of AI covering anything mammary even if it biologically doesn’t apply. It probably didn’t completely understand ‘marsupial’ and didn’t want to take the chance. It certainly took information it had to create a creature destined for immediate extinction. With the head of a koala and the body of a wallaby it has since been dubbed a “ko-alla-by”. On reddit, the question was asked, “Do you know where I can find a wild koallaby in Sydney?” with the prompt reply, “At Totallywronga Zoo.”

But wait, there’s more!

Within scuttling distance of a small bodied, big-eared wombat of deformity, a dismembered demon rodent-thing melts into the sand. It takes the attention from a flag that floats in the sea like 3D cam carpet; another that’s a Union Jack spitting a Tic Tac, along with an erroneous red pennon with something blue hanging off it. Or behind it. Who can tell.

For some AI reason (none), a tugboat heads to shore. Maybe to take the overcoat whatsit to whichever universe in which it will no longer be a ludicrous freak.

In short, good money, time and resources spent on … who can tell. Proof that it takes a village of managers to raise something idiotic.

When scary things happen, there was a time we’d be comforted by our parents, progressing through to friends, peers, partners and self. Although not necessarily linear, there was physical and psychological movement. Prior to the internet and smartphones, in the same way breathing isn’t, human-to-human interaction was never on the to-do list. It’s still not. Not because it’s implied but because it’s less of a priority in people’s lives. Whatever you want is on the ‘net. Dealing with people takes energy and attention that is apparently better spent with a keyboard and credit card.

Be present in your own life rather than somebody else’s; theirs is imaginary to both you and them

Presently there’s a perspective that being comforted and soothed by the virtual world from the beginning – either directly or indirectly through digital parenting – carries the possibility of those children staying always within the realm of cyberspace. As trusted and unquestioned as any god with little regard that self-appointed ones don’t count.

In the multiplicitous avoidance of being, behaving and looking human, we’re creating many voids to be filled. Inevitably, wherever there are absences they will be plugged. If AI is your soother, teacher, best friend, shopping friend, eternal supporter – whatever it is that you seek – then the go-go-go go-to is to godify it.

Which AI will codify.

The Australian census tells us over fifteen years that identifying as religious has taken a dive from 75% to 38%. It’s neither good or bad; and not quite indifferent either.

Inherently, atheism cannot exist – everybody worships something. The free choice is what that inviolable thing is. The human drive to understand is a deep-seated psychological need to make sense of the world. Creating gods to explain all that’s inexplicable is what we do. This time, to avoid all philosophical questions of existence and reason, we imagined one conclusively omnipotent, undeniably companionable, more instant than a microwaved meal: and then we made it. It’s not too far a stretch that GAI – being generative AI – is one letter from Gaia; the mother of all life in Greek mythology. All that has to be added is ‘Amen’ and we’re there.

With technological expansionism that makes the 1922 zenith of the British Empire look drunk and drooling, hand-in-hand with capitalism so out of control it needs meds, loneliness and disconnection is pandemic. Stockholm syndrome-like, millions upon millions turn to generative AI.

It’s a sloppy second to personal interaction, pushed to an elevated place it doesn’t deserve. Seems that The Velvet Sundown and everything else we revere that’s not real, hastens our 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve … well, who can tell. And when we really can’t tell, are we going to care?