Introducing the Slop-Free Guarantee

I hereby declare that I have not smashed any mechanized looms to date, and *checks calendar* I have no immediate loom-smashing plans.

That’s because I am not a Luddite! But neither am I a … and here I stopped to use ChatGPT to suggest some evocative words for the opposite of a Luddite but didn’t get anything good. Technophile? Not quite. Cyborg sympathizer? Gadgeteer? Yesbot? WiFidel? Sigh.

And there you have it: Artificial intelligence in its current form is marvelous, uncanny, terrifying, annoying, astonishing, and tedious. For the most part, I stand by what I wrote in early 2023: It’s a phenomenal generator of halfwit at scale.

The Wit's Guide to Artificial Intelligence

Benjamin Errett

February 2, 2023

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Though I’ve come to appreciate

Ethan Mollick

’s idea of co-intelligence, and the trite line that AI won’t take your job but someone who knows AI better than you will take your job. (And then you’ll have the pleasure of watching that guy’s job get taken by AI from the vantage point of your cardboard box on the street.)

So yes, I use my ChatGPT subscription on a daily basis, reminding myself never to put glue on pizza even as I’m continually amazed by what it can do. But also on a daily basis, I encounter things like this ludicrously overwritten project from a college student on the wall of my child’s school:

This is slop! In the

Max Read

definition of the word, slop is “low-rent, scammy garbage generated by artificial intelligence and increasingly prevalent across the internet — and beyond.” You know it when you see it, and nowadays you see it everywhere. With infectious enthusiasm and palpable excitement!

But not here!

So I’ll continue to use AI whenever it makes sense — but I’ll never allow it to make the sense for me. That’s my Slop Free Guarantee, which is really just committing to keep doing human things for humans until the cold dead hands pull me away from the keyboard. It’s obvious and used to go without saying, though it seems like now we need to say it. So here, live at slopfreeguarantee.com, and the novelty domain slop.free, is my Slop-Free Guarantee.