We Made AI Compulsory. Now We’re Making It Contemptible.

A note on LinkedIn’s new feature inviting us to report one another for AI slop. Yes, I have an opinion.

We spent three years making AI use compulsory, and now we’re making it contemptible.

We even lured everyone in with snake-charming AI features:

“Want help writing?”
“Enhance your post.”
“Write with AI.”
“Make it shorter.”
“Make it funny.”
“Write a hook.”
“Make it casual.”
“Brainstorm titles.”
“Create a summary.”

We embedded these prompts inside every text editor on every platform, the technological equivalent of someone standing over your shoulder whispering, You know, the machine could do that for you. How devilish.

Just as quickly, we rolled out detection features with all our authenticity policing (I spy an em dash, you cheater), status signaling (I’m a real writer, not one of those fake types), aesthetic disgust (ewww, this is so formulaic, writing should be messier).

So, a couple of observations.

We’ve stuffed so much AI down everyone’s throats, we’re all coming to detest it. Myself included. Too much of a good thing is still too much, no matter how good. Or, what do they say, the dose makes the poison?

But the hypocrisy of this moment is damaging, disrespectful, and defeating.

The first era of AI was organized around the fear of falling behind.

The second era, the one we’re squarely in now, is organized around the fear of being found out.

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I wish it were as simple as hypocrisy. It runs deeper.

This is what happens when several unresolved social conflicts collide:

• Institutions coerced adoption without creating a social contract for acceptable use.

• Technology companies treated the world’s creative work as available training material, then transferred responsibility for ethical use to individual users.

• Employers celebrated AI productivity while threatening the economic value of the people expected to produce it.

• Platforms filled themselves with cheap synthetic content, then invited users to police one another for the degradation those platforms economically incentivized.

• People were told AI literacy would confer status. Now visible dependence on AI can cost status.

• We never established where assistance ends and authorship begins, so everyone is making up a moral boundary and prosecuting everyone else from it.

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AI spotting is becoming a status ritual

That last conflict, where assistance ends and authorship begins, matters quite a bit.

AI-shaming isn’t simply an authorship dispute. It’s becoming a class and competence ritual. “I can spot AI” has become a way to claim taste, discernment, and judgment (all our favorite new words, have you noticed?) over someone presumed to lack the qualities of the thinking class.

There’s a name for part of the reflex underneath it: the effort heuristic. We tend to judge the value of work by the effort we believe went into producing it. Sweat is data. And AI definitely breaks that calculator.

When a decent paragraph can appear from a single prompt, something in us panics. Mockery becomes the fastest way to restore the old scoreboard:

I toiled, therefore my work is worth more than yours.

It isn’t really about the sentence. It’s about protecting the price of effort itself.

But effort has never been the same thing as value. A person can spend six hours writing something terrible. Another can produce something extraordinary in twenty minutes. We’ve all sat through the meeting someone worked very hard to prepare.

Work doesn’t become meaningful merely because it hurt (insert rock ballad). And AI-assisted work does not become meaningless merely because it didn’t.

The question should be whether a human being brought an idea, exercised judgment, verified the claims, made deliberate choices, and remained accountable for what was published.

Instead, we’re inspecting the prose for machine fingerprints and missing the almighty point of the thing.

Human error is becoming a CAPTCHA

Here comes an irony so ironic I just can’t even:

Now, NOW, we’re beginning to deform our natural writing to perform humanness.

Has anyone else removed an em dash you’ve literally always used? Made sentences deliberately less orderly? Smashed paragraphs together to avoid a telltale stack of single sentences? (I’m doing it right now.) Left imperfections behind as proof of life Even, EVEN, asked AI to “make this not sound like AI”?

Human error is becoming a CAPTCHA.

We are deliberately writing worse, or at least less naturally, to prove we wrote anything at all.

For Chrissake, what are we doing here?

I wish aliens would come down to Earth (who are we kidding, they’re probably already here) and tell us how utterly inane we are.

What are we actually objecting to?

What is the point of this morality exercise, anyway? What, exactly, are we objecting to? Low-quality content? Content published without genuine thought? Ideas taken without attribution? Undisclosed AI assistance? Confidently stated falsehoods? Manufactured content to please the algo gods?

These are not the same ethical failure. And none of these problems are unique to AI.

The internet was full of human slop well before AI entered the picture. Humans have always published derivative thoughts, stolen ideas, produced formulaic writing, pretended to know things they didn’t, and manufactured empty content to appease an audience or algorithm.

AI made it cheaper, faster, more abundant, more polished. And remember, we told people this was an amazingly good thing.

Sure, it might be consequential. But abundance is not the same as authorship, polish is not ill-willed deception, and assistance is not automatically fraud.

When we call all of it “slop,” we avoid making the distinctions that would actually help:

Was there a human idea?
Did the author exercise judgment?
Can they defend the argument?
Did they verify what they published?
Did they attribute what belonged to someone else?
Did they contribute anything, or merely manufacture another object for the feed?
Does disclosure materially matter in this context?

And maybe my stupidest question, posed in all seriousness: Is it our job to decide whether someone else’s idea required enough effort to deserve expression?

We never defined worthy use

What we’re finally sensing is that everyone was told to use AI without any definition of what worthy use looked like.

We were told to become more productive without a definition of value.

We were told to get on board with zero idea of the destination.

We turned adoption into a game of winners and losers. Either you were doing it or you were behind. You were self-teaching your way toward expertise in everything, or you were a Luddite. Employers bragged about eliminating jobs and slowing hiring because AI could do the work, while workers were expected to figure it out, save themselves, sink or swim.

Everyone had to evolve faster than the person next to them so they wouldn’t be chairless when the music stopped.

Then, once they used the tools built, marketed, and embedded for precisely that purpose, we began shaming them for it.

Damned if they do. Damned if they don’t.

That’s why I said we were building the Titanic in plain sight. We gave people a tool, a threat, and an adoption target—but no covenant.

No shared understanding of authorship.

No definition of valuable use.

No agreement about disclosure.

No distribution of the gains.

No protection from the risks.

No coherent story about the human future we were supposedly so excited to build.

And now we’re asking individual users to settle all of that by reporting one another.

We’ll probably monetize humanness next

Here’s my cheeky prediction: give it eighteen months.

The same platforms currently congratulating themselves for cracking down on AI slop will start selling us the cure.

“Verified Human” badges.

“100% Human-Made” premium tiers.

A special checkmark certifying that your thoughts are artisanal, organic, locally sourced, and untouched by large language models. “Pure” (cringe).

A predictable platform playbook is to create or amplify a behavior, scale it until users revolt, and then turn the remedy into a product. First, sell us AI assistance. Then, sell us protection from AI abundance. Finally, sell us proof of our own humanity.

Don’t be shocked when “human-made” appears as a checkout option. ;) Someone remember I said this so I can say I toldja so.

For the love of all that is holy, stop the whiplashing.

This is not merely a content quality problem. It is a spectacular social design failure.

Leaders, step up.

If your AI enablement, adoption, or transformation program cannot explain what worthy use looks like—where assistance ends, where accountability begins, how value is defined, and how people benefit—you do not have an AI strategy.

You have tools, pressure, and ambiguity.

We can do better in this moment.

In fact, our next webinar touches quite a lot of this. If your organization is trying to untangle adoption from value—and AI use from actual transformation—we’d like to help.

Not me selling you anything, just me begging us to be less inane.

Register to attend live or get the replay.

Godspeed,

Jess Von Bank

Co-Founder, Now to Next

I write at the intersection of work, technology, and humanity. You’ll find essays here that challenge orthodoxy and make space for possibility. All are written with the future—and the people who will live in it—in mind.

P.S. Please don’t come for me. I hate actual AI slop as much as anyone. But just, everything I said above. Wild times to be a human, amiright?

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