The Importance of Taste in a World of Slop

Welcome to the Sloppening

Take a gentle scroll through any social app and you’ll see it within 10 seconds. AI generated slop. It’s everywhere. AI-narrated TikToks. Copy-paste SEO blogs (this isn’t one of them). LinkedIn essays that sound like they were written by a toaster. And Shrimp Jesus.

What we’re experiencing isn’t just a flood of quirky AI shit, it’s industrialised mediocrity. Every scroll is engineered to game the system rather than say or do anything meaningful. Platforms like Meta actively reward this approach. Their payout schemes and algorithms boost the slop because it drives cheap engagement, even if it drains value from the feed. It’s the logical outcome of optimising for numbers instead of nuance, quantity instead of quality.

This is the Sloppening. An endless churn of low-effort, high-volume content. We’ll conveniently blame AI but the finger should be pointed squarely at humans. We’ve enabled this by setting the success metrics (engagement, clicks, watch time) and AI is just helping us hit them faster. Goodheart said it best – When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

It’s fast, cheap, efficient content, with absolutely no value.

The term “AI slop” was first termed in AI forums back in 2022. By 2024, tech writers like Simon Willison were popularising it, and by 2025 it was mainstream. John Oliver hammered it home on Last Week Tonight, warning that we’ll be “drowning in this shit for the foreseeable future.”

He wasn’t wrong. It’s not just crap content. Slop erodes trust. AI news clips can (and do) fool people. People of a certain age (see, my parents), believe everything they see online and are in complete disbelief that what they’re seeing isn’t real   (fake TV anchors, cats dancing on motorbikes). Worse, this slop gives bad actors cover to dismiss real facts as fake.

Why Taste Matters More Than Ever.

So how do you cut through the slop? Joe Burns puts it bluntly: taste. In an age of infinite content, what’s scarce isn’t more posts. It’s the ability to create something original, unique and engaging.

When every AI platform can generate a press release, realistic photo or blog post in seconds, doubling down on aesthetic, voice, and vibe is how creatives will win. The brands (and individuals) who bring personality, humour, and risk into their content, guided by human taste, will rise above the slop.

The challenge here is that taste is inconvenient. It doesn’t fit in a spreadsheet. Committees hate it because it’s subjective. That’s exactly what makes it the perfect antidote to slop. Taste rejects algorithmic popularity and embraces weirdness, humour, soul, risk, nuance, art – all the places that make for great content. As Burns argues, average is worthless now. AI has industrialised mediocrity. The value lies at the edges.

AI Is a Tool. Not a Slop Machine.

For transparency, we’re not anti AI. Far from it. At The Start, we treat AI just like any other tool. It can spit out 100 taglines in 10 seconds, or conjure up images that range from genius to garbage. As humans, our job is to wade, curate, and find meaning, context, and brand voice.

What we don’t do is hit “generate” and push unedited filler into the world. No soulless blog posts, no bland social media posts dressed up as strategy. Everything that leaves our hands gets a human touch: wit, insight, creativity, polish. One clever, genuinely engaging idea will always outpunch a hundred generic ones. No one wants vanilla content. Unless of course they do, in which case we’ll be out of a job.

Taste Wins

The flood of AI slop makes creativity more valuable than ever. When everything looks, reads, and feels the same, personality connects. People aren’t scrolling mindlessly through Instagram/Linkedin/TikTok looking for content. They want to feel something – something that feels undeniably human. Taste isn’t democratic. The right people will get it, and love you for it.

Safe content blends in. Bold content stands out.

So if you’re serious about cutting through the noise? Embrace risk. Be witty. Be weird. Have a point of view. Stand for something.

Where We Come In

This is what we do at Start. We understand AI’s power and human imagination. We’ll happily test the boundaries of the latest tools on your behalf….but always with taste, strategy, and creative integrity.