Cory Doctorow: No one wants to read your AI slop (Pluralistic, March 2, 2026)

[highplainsdem]

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/02/nonconsensual-slopping/

-snip-

Even the AI companies pitching their products claim that they need human oversight because they are prone to errors (including the errors that the companies dress up by calling them "hallucinations" ). If you've read something you disagree with but don't understand well enough to rebut, and you ask an AI to generate a rebuttal for you, you still don't understand it well enough to rebut it.

-snip-

Remember: even the AI companies will tell you that the work of overseeing an AI's output is valuable labor. The fact that you can costlessly (to you) generate infinite volumes of verbose, plausible-seeming topical sentences in no way implies that the people who actually think about things and then write them down have the time to mark your chatbot's homework.

That is a fatal flaw in the idea that we will increase our productivity by asking chatbots to summarize things we don't understand: by definition, if we don't understand a subject, then we won't be qualified to evaluate the summary, either.

There simply is no substitute for learning about a subject and coming to understand it well enough to advance the subject, whether by contributing your own additions or by critiquing its flaws. That's not to say that we shouldn't aspire to participate in discourse about areas that seem interesting or momentous – but asking a chatbot to contribute on your behalf does not impart insight to you, and it is a gross imposition on people who have taken the time to understand and participate using their own minds and experience.

Much more at the link.

I'd never searched for the very common term "AI slop" until yesterday. I'd seen the term countless times, of course, in social media posts and articles about AI, but had never thought to search for the term itself until someone told me yesterday that the term is overused, shouldn't be used, and that using it shows that someone has "slop for brains." Out of curiosity, I decided to see how many search results would show up with the term that had appeared online very recently. Tried that again today, and this appeared, among lots of other results.

Cory has two links for this piece. The URL that first took me to this is the one above. He also has longer links, permalinks, for individual sections of what he publishes in a day. This is the permalink for this section: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/02/nonconsensual-slopping/#robowanking

[justaprogressive]

1. Yep I've been posting Cory's articles for months

as has Erronis (if memory serves)

Cory is correct, it's slop, to think otherwise is sloppy thinking.

His (Cory's) books are worthy of note as well.