Why AI Slop Creates Your Biggest Content Opportunity

Perhaps you’re familiar with the term “AI slop,” which gained popularity last year and refers to unwanted, useless, AI content.

Click around the internet for any amount of time these days, and you’ll see that it’s in everything, everywhere, all at once.

This is frustrating, to be sure, but it also provides an opportunity.

Because that which people are seeking—answers to their questions, perspectives on issues, instructions on how to accomplish tasks—haven’t really changed.

Which means that creating content the right way, and for the right reasons, is still valuable.

But it also raises a fundamental question: What does “the right way” mean?

Focus on the Why

Perhaps you’re expecting me to add to the chorus of people advising you not to use AI to create your content. Perhaps you’re expecting me to rail on about how AI has made things worse.

But that’s not actually my position.

(Sure, in some ways it has made things worse, and I’ve written about that plenty,  but it’s also done some pretty great things as well.)

It matters less to me how you create your content than why you create your content, and that you build on the right foundation.

At a basic level, the right way to go about creating content is to deliver something useful.

It can be instructional, or polarizing, or even focused on sales or marketing, but it should be inherently worthwhile to the person consuming the content.

Your instructional content should give readers usable instructions.

Your polarizing content should catalyze a reaction in readers.

And your sales or marketing content should make a clear connection between the problem your audience is experiencing and the solution your company provides.

Obsess Over the Value Exchange

If you want people to consume your content, then you have to create content that people want to consume.

If you want people to visit your website, then you have to give people a reason to visit your website.

And if you want people to buy whatever it is you’re selling, then you have to give them a reason to pull out their credit cards.

Just because an LLM can create a blog post for you doesn’t mean that blog post should exist.

If it doesn’t help you achieve a business outcome, and if it doesn’t provide something to the reader, then it’s a waste of everyone’s time, yours included.

Creating content is a value exchange in the same way trading goods for money is, only you’re trading your knowledge for your reader’s time.

When you look at it that way, you’re much less likely to simply put new words out into the world because a technology gives you the opportunity to.

Yes, the world has changed, but the rules from our pre-AI life still apply.

You still need to write words that matter.

You still need to wrestle with how to take what’s in your head and put it into words.

Because every piece of content you create is asking someone to spend their most precious resource—their time—on you.

So make sure you’re giving them something valuable in return.

It’s not just good practice.

It’s a competitive advantage.

And the right thing to do.