The Wit’s Guide to Slop

Or, gruel with chunks

Girl Distributing Low-Quality Content, Richard Westall, 1800

Are we drowning in slop or is slop drowning in us? It’s very much a bucket-half-full question, as recent research suggests the internet is now more than 50% bot spew. And because the search engines have stopped indexing the obviously inanimate stuff, we’ve plateaued. Even computers don’t want to read what they’re writing.

“He not only overflowed with learning but stood in the slop.”
— Sydney Smith

About a year ago, slop had its coming-out party in the form of a big New York magazine feature (a slop-ed?) by

Max Read

. That’s where he formally defined it as “a term of art, akin to spam, for low-rent, scammy garbage generated by artificial intelligence and increasingly prevalent across the internet — and beyond.” After that, people stopped putting slop in scare quotes or calling it AI slop. If we didn’t formally slopt in, we didn’t have a way to slopt out.

“Raineth drop and staineth slop.”
— Ezra Pound

It is fun to create various sloportmanteaux! The expert in this field is

Sean Monahan

. He’s the professional trendspotter who came up with the terms normcore and vibe shift, which makes you wonder how much of his spotting is actually seeding. In July, he wrote about sloptimism, the idea that all culture was once called slop and that worrying about generative AI is just more moral panic. This month it was slopulism, a theory that modern politics is defined by the masses being incoherently upset. And that of course leads to slopaganda, which only last year we were calling deep fakes. Buckle in for the psy-slops!

“It is slop not on purpose but because it is hurried. Because they write when there is nothing to say or no water in the well. Because they are ambitious.”
— Ernest Hemingway

Like cringe, slop has the benefit of being an old analog word given new digital life. In his recent memoir Homework, Geoff Dyer writes not-so-fondly of growing up in 1960s England, when “mum served some slop for tea that was marginally less horrible than the slop we’d been served for dinner (lunch)” and he was haunted by the distinctive smell that permeated the school “when the remains of one day’s slop were being disposed of and the kitchens cleaned prior to the preparation of the next day’s slop.” In retrospect, Dyer wishes he could have a vile vial of the stuff “transported from the past and properly examined by someone from the Jamie Oliver Institute of Nutrition. It would fall below every EU-established standard of what is fit for human and possibly even animal consumption.”

“Hey! You call this slop? Real slop has got chunks of things in it! This is more like gruel!”
— Frank Drebin

I’m so inundated with digital slop that I somehow missed that we’re now calling $20 protein-heavy takeout salads “slop bowls,” because they’re “a bunch of chopped-up ingredients mixed with a sauce and placed in a compostable bowl, resulting in vessels of food that resemble spaceship nutrient slurries more than they resemble, well, food.” I can’t say I’m shocked to read that the “slop bowl chains” Chipotle, Cava, and Sweetgreens are suffering in the marketplace.

“If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.”
— Orson Scott Card

How does the slopocalypse end? I’m no slophthalmologist, but I’d like to see a full-length slopera, a real magnum slopus of the form. Though it’s more likely that the next stage will be antislop. The creators of this mysterious substance redefine slop as “characteristic repetitive phraseology” to be conquered by their “comprehensive framework providing tools to both detect and eliminate these overused patterns.” It sounds like sweeping the slop under the rug, but maybe the word I’m looking for is sloptimization.

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A few months back I had one of my trademark fits of pique and soft-launched the Slop-Free Guarantee at slopfreeguarantee.com. Though I’m typing this on a computer, it’s still me typing it! If you also make stuff with your human brain and would like to make that clear, you’re free to use one of the many Slop-Free logos created for me by designer extraordinaire Geneviève Biloski! Check them out here.

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“Then the devil sang:
Would you like to dance with me?
We’re doing the cosmic slop”
— George Clinton

The cosmic slop, as per Funkadelic, is sexual congress out of wedlock. So there’s that! Sean Monahan says the opposite of slop is aura, so what the hey, I’ll throw that in the Quote Vote for next week alongside some blessedly untrending items.

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Margaret Atwood, the patron saint of Canada, is everywhere right now celebrating the release of her new memoir Book of Lives (spoiler alert: she’s had many). Her words appear on both a Riposte Card (“Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results”.) and the below Aphoristick, both of which I’ll mail to you if you take out a paid subscription.

Issue No. 344 of Get Wit Quick is more of my classic repetitive phraseology. Thanks to Dr. Joshua Landy for discovering the existence of antislop in his secret basement laboratory. As a veteran emdasher — always with a space on each side! — I resent the idea that these punctuations are a telltale sign of ChatGPT at work. Would you believe I first wrote about GPT in 2020? Tron Swifties, I said! This newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. If a trillion bots tap the ❤️ below, eventually they’ll empty the oceans and/or produce another Hamlet. But if you do it, it’ll make my day.