Name: Anonymous 2025-11-19 16:01
Last week I needed to fix the left hinge on my 2017 MacBook Pro. You know the one: Apple designed it so that if you open the lid more than 110 degrees, the aluminum starts to split like a cheap hot dog on a too-hot grill, and for four years they charged $429 to "repair" it by replacing the entire top case, until a class action told them to knock it off. I didn't want to pay $429. I didn't want to replace the top case. I wanted a guy who had fucked this up before to tell me what he did to jury-rig it into working for another two years.
So I Googled it. The first five results were not that guy. They were AI slop.
Each one was a 1,400-word "comprehensive guide" that opened with the exact same sentence: "If you own a 2017 MacBook Pro, you may have noticed that the left hinge can begin to fail over time." It was like reading a form letter written by a toaster that had been trained on every mediocre tech support article ever written, then told to stretch it out until it hit a SEO word count. One told me to "gather the appropriate tools, such as a precision screwdriver set and replacement parts." No shit. Another suggested "contacting Apple Support for professional assistance," which is exactly what I was trying to avoid. A third spent 300 words explaining the "history of MacBook Pro hinge design" before admitting, in the last paragraph, that it had no idea how to fix the problem.
The sixth result was a Reddit thread from 2019. The OP was a guy named u/garagegremlin69, who posted a photo of his laptop propped open with a Pabst Blue Ribbon can, and a comment that read: "Folded a tiny piece of 220-grit sandpaper into the hinge bracket. Took 5 minutes. Hasn't broken again in 4 years. Don't tell Apple. They'll send the lawyers." That guy has done more tangible good for humanity than every AI startup CEO combined. And he didn't even get a $20 million seed round to do it.
Here's the thing about AI slop: no one is talking about the stuff that matters. The tech press spends all its time writing about whether GPT-5 will be sentient, or whether Sam Altman is going to get fired again, or whether Google's latest model can pass a bar exam. No one is talking about the endless, gray, flavorless gruel that is now oozing into every single corner of the internet that used to have useful information.
(For the record: I have nothing against AI that does useful things. The AI that helps radiologists spot tumors faster? Good. The AI that optimizes power grids to use less energy? Great. The AI that tells me how to fix my laptop hinge? Does not exist. The AI that tells me to call Apple and pay $429? Exists in abundance. Go figure.)
It's the recipe site that used to have a grandma's chocolate chip cookie recipe, now padded out with 4,000 words of AI-written garbage about "the history of the chocolate chip cookie" and "how to pair cookies with artisanal milk" before you get to the ingredients. It's the product review that says "this vacuum is great for homes of all sizes" instead of telling you that it dies after 12 minutes of cleaning carpet, and that the dust bin is so small you have to empty it three times to do a single bedroom. It's the customer service chatbot that asks you to "please elaborate on your issue" three times before admitting it can't help you, then transfers you to a human who's been trained to say the exact same things the bot did.
It's not just annoying. It's actively worse than nothing. If you're trying to fix a car brake line and the AI slop tells you to use duct tape instead of a proper fitting, you could get hurt. If you're allergic to nuts and the AI slop forgets to mention that the recipe it copied has almond flour, you could end up in the ER. The slop doesn't know. The slop doesn't care. The slop just knows how to hit a word count, and how to make a CEO's profit margin look a little better.
The people selling this slop will tell you it's "democratizing content creation." They'll tell you it's "saving businesses time and money." They'll post threads on Twitter/X about how "AI is unlocking human potential" while their portfolio companies fire their entire content teams and replace them with a guy who knows how to type "write a blog post about cordless leaf blowers" into ChatGPT. Sam Altman will stand in front of Congress and warn that AI could kill us all, then fly back to San Francisco and sign off on an API update that makes it 30% faster to generate fake Amazon reviews. The head of Google's AI ethics team will write a 3,000-word essay about "responsible innovation" for *Wired*, then approve a change that replaces 40% of Google's support articles with slop that doesn't answer a single question.
They are not stupid. They are just not talking about the AI that affects you.
I had a friend who used to write product reviews for a small tech site. He got paid $150 a review, and he would spend 8 hours testing the product, taking photos, and writing about the stuff that actually matters: Does the battery die mid-use? Does the charging port wiggle so much you have to hold the cable in place? Does the software crash when you try to import photos from a camera? Last year, the site fired him. Now they generate all their reviews with AI. The AI has never touched the product. The AI has never used the product. The AI doesn't know if the charging port wiggles. The AI just knows how to write "this product is a great choice for tech enthusiasts."
The irony here is almost too thick to cut with a butter knife. The same venture capitalists who spent the 2010s complaining about "content mills" — the low-paid writers churning out garbage for SEO — are now the ones funding the biggest content mills in human history. The same marketing bros who used to mock "clickbait" are now the ones sending you AI-written cold emails that say "I loved your recent thought leadership on synergistic cloud solutions" when you haven't written anything in six months. The same people who told us the internet would "connect the world" are now using AI to turn the world's most useful information network into a landfill.
And the worst part? It's working. Not because the slop is good. Because it's cheap. Because a CEO who makes $5 million a year doesn't care if the product review is useless, as long as it costs $0 instead of $150. Because a VC who's trying to hit a 10x return doesn't care if the internet becomes unreadable, as long as his AI startup exits for $1 billion. Because the people making the decisions about AI slop are the ones who will never have to scroll past five pages of it to find out how to fix their laptop hinge.
They'll never have to spend 10 minutes clicking through a recipe site that's 90% AI slop to find out how much butter goes in the cookies. They'll never have to talk to a chatbot that doesn't understand their problem. They'll never have to rely on the internet for the small, useful things, because they have people who do that for them. A guy whose entire job is to find the Reddit thread with the sandpaper trick. A guy who cooks them cookies from a real recipe. A guy who fixes their laptop without charging them $429.
I get the arguments, by the way. "AI is just a tool!" Yeah, sure. A hammer is a tool. A screwdriver is a tool. If I gave a hammer to every person in a mall and told them to use it to open every door, eventually all the doors would be broken, and I'd be on a yacht talking about how I "reimagined pedestrian access." The problem isn't the tool. The problem is that every single person with the money to buy the tool is using it to break things that were already working.
I fixed my laptop hinge, by the way. I used the sandpaper trick. It took 5 minutes. It cost me nothing. The AI slop didn't help. The guy on Reddit did.
The next time you hear a CEO or a VC tell you that AI is going to "change the world," remember that. Remember that the world they're trying to change is one where regular people can help each other. Remember that the slop they're selling isn't progress. It's just garbage. And garbage, no matter how much you call it "innovation," no matter how many $100 million rounds you raise to make more of it, is still just garbage.
And eventually, we're all going to be stuck living in the landfill.
So I Googled it. The first five results were not that guy. They were AI slop.
Each one was a 1,400-word "comprehensive guide" that opened with the exact same sentence: "If you own a 2017 MacBook Pro, you may have noticed that the left hinge can begin to fail over time." It was like reading a form letter written by a toaster that had been trained on every mediocre tech support article ever written, then told to stretch it out until it hit a SEO word count. One told me to "gather the appropriate tools, such as a precision screwdriver set and replacement parts." No shit. Another suggested "contacting Apple Support for professional assistance," which is exactly what I was trying to avoid. A third spent 300 words explaining the "history of MacBook Pro hinge design" before admitting, in the last paragraph, that it had no idea how to fix the problem.
The sixth result was a Reddit thread from 2019. The OP was a guy named u/garagegremlin69, who posted a photo of his laptop propped open with a Pabst Blue Ribbon can, and a comment that read: "Folded a tiny piece of 220-grit sandpaper into the hinge bracket. Took 5 minutes. Hasn't broken again in 4 years. Don't tell Apple. They'll send the lawyers." That guy has done more tangible good for humanity than every AI startup CEO combined. And he didn't even get a $20 million seed round to do it.
Here's the thing about AI slop: no one is talking about the stuff that matters. The tech press spends all its time writing about whether GPT-5 will be sentient, or whether Sam Altman is going to get fired again, or whether Google's latest model can pass a bar exam. No one is talking about the endless, gray, flavorless gruel that is now oozing into every single corner of the internet that used to have useful information.
(For the record: I have nothing against AI that does useful things. The AI that helps radiologists spot tumors faster? Good. The AI that optimizes power grids to use less energy? Great. The AI that tells me how to fix my laptop hinge? Does not exist. The AI that tells me to call Apple and pay $429? Exists in abundance. Go figure.)
It's the recipe site that used to have a grandma's chocolate chip cookie recipe, now padded out with 4,000 words of AI-written garbage about "the history of the chocolate chip cookie" and "how to pair cookies with artisanal milk" before you get to the ingredients. It's the product review that says "this vacuum is great for homes of all sizes" instead of telling you that it dies after 12 minutes of cleaning carpet, and that the dust bin is so small you have to empty it three times to do a single bedroom. It's the customer service chatbot that asks you to "please elaborate on your issue" three times before admitting it can't help you, then transfers you to a human who's been trained to say the exact same things the bot did.
It's not just annoying. It's actively worse than nothing. If you're trying to fix a car brake line and the AI slop tells you to use duct tape instead of a proper fitting, you could get hurt. If you're allergic to nuts and the AI slop forgets to mention that the recipe it copied has almond flour, you could end up in the ER. The slop doesn't know. The slop doesn't care. The slop just knows how to hit a word count, and how to make a CEO's profit margin look a little better.
The people selling this slop will tell you it's "democratizing content creation." They'll tell you it's "saving businesses time and money." They'll post threads on Twitter/X about how "AI is unlocking human potential" while their portfolio companies fire their entire content teams and replace them with a guy who knows how to type "write a blog post about cordless leaf blowers" into ChatGPT. Sam Altman will stand in front of Congress and warn that AI could kill us all, then fly back to San Francisco and sign off on an API update that makes it 30% faster to generate fake Amazon reviews. The head of Google's AI ethics team will write a 3,000-word essay about "responsible innovation" for *Wired*, then approve a change that replaces 40% of Google's support articles with slop that doesn't answer a single question.
They are not stupid. They are just not talking about the AI that affects you.
I had a friend who used to write product reviews for a small tech site. He got paid $150 a review, and he would spend 8 hours testing the product, taking photos, and writing about the stuff that actually matters: Does the battery die mid-use? Does the charging port wiggle so much you have to hold the cable in place? Does the software crash when you try to import photos from a camera? Last year, the site fired him. Now they generate all their reviews with AI. The AI has never touched the product. The AI has never used the product. The AI doesn't know if the charging port wiggles. The AI just knows how to write "this product is a great choice for tech enthusiasts."
The irony here is almost too thick to cut with a butter knife. The same venture capitalists who spent the 2010s complaining about "content mills" — the low-paid writers churning out garbage for SEO — are now the ones funding the biggest content mills in human history. The same marketing bros who used to mock "clickbait" are now the ones sending you AI-written cold emails that say "I loved your recent thought leadership on synergistic cloud solutions" when you haven't written anything in six months. The same people who told us the internet would "connect the world" are now using AI to turn the world's most useful information network into a landfill.
And the worst part? It's working. Not because the slop is good. Because it's cheap. Because a CEO who makes $5 million a year doesn't care if the product review is useless, as long as it costs $0 instead of $150. Because a VC who's trying to hit a 10x return doesn't care if the internet becomes unreadable, as long as his AI startup exits for $1 billion. Because the people making the decisions about AI slop are the ones who will never have to scroll past five pages of it to find out how to fix their laptop hinge.
They'll never have to spend 10 minutes clicking through a recipe site that's 90% AI slop to find out how much butter goes in the cookies. They'll never have to talk to a chatbot that doesn't understand their problem. They'll never have to rely on the internet for the small, useful things, because they have people who do that for them. A guy whose entire job is to find the Reddit thread with the sandpaper trick. A guy who cooks them cookies from a real recipe. A guy who fixes their laptop without charging them $429.
I get the arguments, by the way. "AI is just a tool!" Yeah, sure. A hammer is a tool. A screwdriver is a tool. If I gave a hammer to every person in a mall and told them to use it to open every door, eventually all the doors would be broken, and I'd be on a yacht talking about how I "reimagined pedestrian access." The problem isn't the tool. The problem is that every single person with the money to buy the tool is using it to break things that were already working.
I fixed my laptop hinge, by the way. I used the sandpaper trick. It took 5 minutes. It cost me nothing. The AI slop didn't help. The guy on Reddit did.
The next time you hear a CEO or a VC tell you that AI is going to "change the world," remember that. Remember that the world they're trying to change is one where regular people can help each other. Remember that the slop they're selling isn't progress. It's just garbage. And garbage, no matter how much you call it "innovation," no matter how many $100 million rounds you raise to make more of it, is still just garbage.
And eventually, we're all going to be stuck living in the landfill.