A model of this story appeared in NCS Business’ Nightcap publication. To get it in your inbox, join free here.
New York
It’s getting tougher to flee slop, the synthetic intelligence-generated pablum that has crept into our colleagues’ slide decks, our social media feeds, our news outlets, even our real-estate listings.
“Slop oozes into everything,” wrote the editors of Merriam-Webster, who selected “slop” as their 2025 word of the year. “Like slime, sludge, and muck, slop has the wet sound of something you don’t want to touch.”
That’s why I’m taking a second to see into my crystal ball and make one of these dreaded year-end predictions: 2026 will be the year of “100% human” marketing.
Hear me out.
AI “slop” tends to evoke innocuous photos of “Shrimp Jesus” or big-eyed cat soap operas. But the slop imagery is getting extra subtle, making a crisis of confidence amongst even these of us who grew up with the web and fancy themselves professional, or at the very least first rate, spotters of faux stuff. The traditional tells — unnatural lighting, awkwardly rendered palms, incongruous background photos — have been largely smoothed over.
An informal scroll on TikTookay now looks like a check: Did you notice the faux or did you mindlessly double-tap on that video of bunnies bouncing on a trampoline? (You know you fell for it! We all did!)
It’s a crummy feeling, being duped. And some semblance of a backlash has already begun.
Last month, the radio and podcasting big iHeartMedia rolled out a “guaranteed human” tagline, promising customers that it won’t use “AI-generated personalities” or play AI-generated music.
The San Antonio-based audio firm’s personal analysis discovered 90% of its listeners — even those that use AI instruments themselves — need their media created by people.
“It’s important for us to remember, as marketers, that we’re in a very delicate position within a turbulent time, both in America and around the world,” Bob Pittman, CEO of iHeartMedia, said in a statement this fall. “Consumers are not just looking for convenience — they’re searching for meaning.”
iHeartMedia will not be alone. Earlier this month, the editors of The Tyee, an impartial information web site in Canada, published their decision to undertake a no-AI coverage, saying they’d not publish “journalism that is written or generated by AI.” (To be positive, it’s a small newsroom, and few if any main information retailers have made related commitments. But a number of distinguished newspapers which have rushed to embrace AI at the moment are coping with the fallout, most notably the Washington Post, which not too long ago launched a extensively criticized error-ridden podcast bot.)
In Hollywood, the place AI is usually seen as an existential menace, some creators are driving the level house with audiences. “This show was made by humans,” read the credits of “Pluribus,” the hit Apple TV sequence from “Breaking Bad” creator Vince Gilligan. Others are actively rooting against “Tilly Norwood,” the AI-generated “actress” whose creators swear Tilly is extra of a digital experiment and never an effort to interchange human actors.
On Pinterest, the go-to web site for style temper boards and wedding ceremony inspiration, the firm’s embrace of AI is alienating its most devoted customers, as my colleague Ramishah Maruf reported final month. And throughout New York City, subway adverts for the wearable AI recording machine often known as “Friend” have been the goal of relentless vandalism, inspiring passersby to scrawl messages like “AI is not your friend” and “talk to a neighbor.”
One artist was so fed up with the decline of the web, she created Slop Evader, a browser extension that filters internet searches to incorporate solely outcomes from earlier than November 2022 — earlier than the launch of ChatGPT.
Bottom line: I could be flawed! So far, the AI pushback is tiny in contrast with the swath of Corporate America that’s satisfied it’s the future of the total financial system. Ultimately, we’ll need to see if experiments in anti-AI marketing yield any actual returns.
Still, I think that the extra Wall Street and the C-suite opine about the brilliance of AI and its boundless potential to extend productiveness and even creativity, the extra many individuals are going to see it as a lure.
So far, our lived expertise with chatbots and picture mills is a combined bag. Sure, it might be enjoyable to tell Sora to make a video of my canine flying with Santa Claus over the Parisian skyline. And yeah, generally a chatbot is best than a typical internet search while you want journey suggestions. But additionally it is a deepfake generator that may quickly amplify misinformation (as xAI’s Grok did during the Bondi Beach shooting Sunday) and lure folks into delusional, sometimes deadly spirals.
Consumers and creatives would possibly simply be beginning to cry uncle. Or at the very least, choose some issues nonetheless made by human palms.