# AI slop = human laziness.

/notes · 2026-09-01 · cedric amanou

Here is my thesis. Humans shy away from productive work and chase instant satisfaction. Now give them a super intelligent machine that builds apps and writes books. They "feel" hyper productive. Minimal effort, instant reward. They are satisfied.

Until their GPT or Claude hands them slop. And they'll believe the slop is the machine.

It's not. Let me explain with what i do myself:

Tomorrow I need a presentation.

1. What I should do:

spend 20 minutes laying out the structure of what I want. What's number 1, what's number 2, what's number 3. Put my brain juice into it. That's always the best starting point. And I know it.

2. Instead, here is what I do.

Prompt: "You are a marketing genius and a UX god. Please give me a presentation on X subject. Make it short and snappy. Make it so that humans would love it."

That's it. 25 seconds max. And now I'm excited. I want to see if by magic the AI will deliver something up to my expectations. I want to be surprised.

3. What comes back is a deck.

It has a format, a sequence, headings. None of it is mine. The AI had to invent all of it because I gave it nothing. So it gave me the average. And usually its no good.

4. Now what I should do:

print it, take a pen, cross out what I don't like, write "this is good, this is bad", maybe redo the whole flow myself now that I've seen a bad version. That's work. So I don't.

5. What I do instead.

Prompt: "The intro is too long. Move the pricing to the end. Make it punchier." 20 seconds. Feels like work again.

6. Third try. Fourth. Ninth. Hours go by.

I'm re-prompting and re-prompting to update an output that never aligned with what I wanted, because I NEVER SAID WHAT I WANTED. And I'm frustrated. At the AI.

Look at that flow again. Twenty minutes of thinking, avoided. Two hours of typing, wasted. And every one of those prompts felt like work. None of it was.

People get frustrated with AI. I know why. They don't get frustrated at the slop. They get frustrated because they realize they still have to put in the work.

What I found is simple. Take a piece of paper. No computer, no help, nothing. Use your brain. Create the flow yourself. When you are clear about it and you know what's 1, 2 and 3, THEN give it to the AI. The answer is much better because it's aligned to what you actually wanted. You can review it. It's yours.

AI is a tool. Use it for research, for pulling things together. But don't let it build freely. That's what most people are doing, and that's why there is so much slop on the internet today.

The slop is a mirror. Stop being mad at it.

— cedric amanou