Slop is a decision, not a byproduct.
There's endless human slop everywhere. Terrible "art," overwrought prose, films with dead dialogue: things that never needed to exist.
Because slop isn't a tool problem. It's a taste and standards problem. And good taste is developed and exercised, or it isn't.
AI drops the cost of production to near zero. It doesn't drop the cost of bad taste or weak thinking. Knowledge advances through error correction, not volume. Slop is what happens when you skip that step: just output, because output got cheap. And cheap production is inherently a good thing.
Confusing activity with progress is the oldest mistake going. It predates LLMs and diffusion models by centuries.
Who approved this? That's it. That's the whole thing.