This Mess Was Entirely Predictable
The current flood of AI-generated content is not a threat to good design; it is the predictable, temporary outcome of a powerful new tool becoming widely available. This abundance of low-quality material, or “slop,” actually makes thoughtful design and genuine creativity more valuable, not less. The market is already beginning to correct itself, and as it does, quality will become the key differentiator.
If you’re a designer or a writer, it’s easy to look at the sheer volume of mediocrity and wonder what the point is. It feels overwhelming.
The thing is, I’ve been in this line of work long enough to see this pattern play out before.
This isn’t new, it’s just bigger.
A Pattern I’ve Seen Before
I remember (not to date myself but...) when Macromedia Flash first arrived. Suddenly, anyone with a bit of patience could build a website with swooping animations, spinning logos, and elaborate introductory sequences. The result was a period of absolute chaos in web design. Navigating the web in the late nineties often felt like being trapped in a laser light show.
Most of it was dreadful. Sites were slow, confusing, and often completely unusable. I should know; I spent a fair bit of 1999 making things move around on a screen for no particular reason.
The problem with the first wave of a new creative technology isn't the tool itself; it's our collective inability to demonstrate restraint when using it.
But that phase passed. It passed because users grew tired of waiting for a 10-megabyte animation to load just to find a company’s phone number. Businesses realized that a clean, fast, and intuitive website converted more customers than one with a baffling, animated menu. The slop was washed away by the simple market pressure for things that actually worked. Good design, which is to say thoughtful and user-focused design, won out. The cream, to quote Macho Man, rose to the top.
The Camera in Everyone's Pocket
We saw it again with the rise of the smartphone camera. Before the iPhone, photography was a somewhat more deliberate act. You needed a camera which was not a small investment, and you needed to know at least a little about how to use it. Then, suddenly, nearly everyone had a reasonably capable camera with them at all times.
The result was an immediate and staggering increase in the number of photographs being taken. And yes, a great many of them were not very good. We were inundated with blurry concert photos, poorly lit meals, and an endless stream of over-filtered sunsets. But two important things happened:
It gave creative people access to a tool they might not have had before. A new generation of photographers emerged who learned their craft on a phone, unburdened by the technical gatekeeping of the DSLR world.
As a culture, our collective visual literacy improved. We all got better at spotting a good photo from a bad one, because we were seeing so many of them.
Again, the initial noise gave way to a new standard of quality. The best work stood out more, precisely because there was so much mediocrity to compare it against.
So, What's Different About AI?
AI is following the same pattern, but on a much larger scale. It’s not just websites or photos. It’s text, code, video, audio, and strategic plans. The tool is more powerful and more accessible than anything that has come before it, so the corresponding wave of slop is tidal. It clogs search results with plausible-sounding nonsense and fills social media with generic, soulless images and videos.
The challenge this time is that the slop is often more convincing. An ugly Flash website was obviously ugly. An AI-generated article, however, can be grammatically correct and well-structured, yet entirely devoid of a point of view or factual accuracy. This makes the signal-to-noise ratio feel particularly low right now.
We Are Correcting as We Speak
Still, the correction has already begun. Humans have a finite tolerance for generic content. We instinctively seek out authenticity and a unique perspective. We look for the hand of the artist, even if that hand is now using AI as one of its tools.
We are also seeing the platforms themselves start to filter the noise.
Detection and Watermarking: Social platforms like LinkedIn are already experimenting with labels that identify AI-assisted content. Toolmakers like Anthropic are developing invisible watermarks to help identify machine-generated text.
Search Algorithm Adjustments: Google’s updates from March 2024 specifically target “unhelpful content,” penalizing sites that appear to be gaming the system with high volumes of low-quality, AI-generated articles. Their focus on rewarding “Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness” (E-E-A-T) is a direct response to this problem.
These systems aren't perfect, but they represent the start of a systemic pushback. The most powerful filter, however, remains human taste. We will pay for, and pay attention to, things that feel like they were made by a person who cared.
For designers, writers, and other creatives, the job is not to out-produce the machines. The job is to have a point of view. It is to use these tools to amplify your own taste, your own expertise, and your own unique perspective. The slop is just noise. The signal is your craft. And in a world this loud, a clear signal is worth more than ever.