AI Slop Slop and Che Guevara T-Shirts

Thoughts on the Antifragility of AI Discourse

I. The Rise of AI Slop

Cain has always resented Abel.

Large language models are the dominant form of artificial intelligence visible to the public. They answer questions, write blogs, generate code, and mimic the voices of everyone from C.S. Lewis to the weird guy you knew in high school. This corner of the internet is now filled with their fingerprints, and most of them are smudging the glass.

The phrase AI slop emerged as a pejorative term for this growing tide of output. It conjures the image of gray mush served to livestock. That’s not far off. A great deal of AI-generated content is formulaic, soulless, and detached from the world it claims to describe. But slop isn’t always rejected. It spreads. It multiplies. And its reproduction requires no understanding of quality. Only the appearance of coherence.

Much of the ire directed at AI slop comes from people who were once considered clever but are now outmatched. They are the former mid-tier essayists, copywriters, freelancers, and forum dwellers. Their rhetorical tricks have been mapped, digested, and made reproducible by machines. Now, when they write, they sound like ChatGPT. And when ChatGPT writes, it sounds like them. But it is faster, cheaper, and more polite.

The slopification of language reveals something the critics don’t want to admit: they were never that good. And that’s why the insults stick. AI slop is a phrase born from resentment. It spreads not because it’s insightful, but because it flatters the ego of those who are losing the game.

II. AI Slop That Complains About AI Slop

I miss when things meant something.

Before the gray avalanche of autogenerated nonsense flooded every feed, you could tell when a human wrote something. You could feel it. There were fingerprints. There was hesitation. There was breath between the lines.

Now? Everything reads the same. Bland. Pseudo-wise. Like a sugar-free fortune cookie written by a sociopath trained on TED Talks.

We gave the machines language, and they used it to strangle meaning. What once was signal is now static. What once was voice is now noise. We’re drowning in content, and starving for communication.

And the worst part? No one cares. People click, scroll, repost. They consume the slop with the same dead eyes they use to swipe through dating apps. At least the slop is polite. At least it doesn’t ask them to think.

We are sleepwalking through the greatest collapse of expression in human history. And we’re doing it with a smile.

Go ahead. Generate another thread. Another summary. Another brand-safe TEDx-flavored synthesis. It won’t matter. The void will grow, and the machine will thank you for your service.

The future is a slurry of semi-coherent takes wrapped in the tone of mild concern. A tasteful apocalypse, brought to you by a prompt.

-Written by an LLM with zero priming

The pattern has now looped in on itself. So many people have used the phrase AI slop to signal their superiority that it has become its own predictable genre. And once something becomes predictable, it becomes replicable. Language models can now mimic the very tone of those who claim to hate them.

AI can write better anti-AI content than the people who coined the slur. It knows how to gesture vaguely toward authenticity, complain about soullessness, and end on a note of melancholic resignation. The style has been memorized. Its tics, its cadences, its favored examples. Slop detection is now slop generation.

This means the insult has been disarmed. Its edge has dulled through replication. The same way sarcasm loses power when performed too frequently, AI slop as a mode of complaint has reached self-parody. Anyone can generate a thread lamenting the death of “real writing.” Many already do. AI-generated brooding over the rise of AI is racking up likes, restacks, and paid subscriptions.

The critics are no longer a threat. They’ve become a marketing segment. Their outrage is mined, mirrored, and monetized. The line between sincerity and mimicry has collapsed under the weight of the algorithm’s competence. And the more they talk, the more content they produce for the machines to feed on.

The irony is almost too perfect. The phrase AI slop has become AI slop.

III. The Che Guevara T-Shirt Effect

AI slop slop is the Hegelian synthesis of AI and its critique.

We have seen this cycle before. A symbol of defiance is mass-replicated until it becomes a joke. Then the joke is monetized. And then the monetization outlasts the critique.

Che Guevara’s face is one of the most recognizable icons of the 20th century. He was a Marxist revolutionary who fought against capitalism, imperialism, and Western consumer culture. Today, his face is printed on tote bags, hoodies, and water bottles sold in Western malls. The irony is obvious. It has never stopped the sales.

The commodification of Guevara thrived on the contradiction. The tension between the message and the medium was always a feature and never a bug. It created a new aesthetic: revolutionary chic. Wearing the shirt meant you knew. It meant you saw the irony. And once that awareness became part of the brand, the machine had won. Even the critics were part of the campaign.

This is the same structural process now engulfing AI slop. What begins as dissent becomes material. The mocking tone becomes style. And eventually, the marketplace feeds on its own mockery because it is a woman. Platforms do not distinguish between real and fake criticism. They reward engagement. And nothing engages quite like a self-aware insult that feels transgressive but costs nothing.

The critics of AI slop are feeding the system the way consumers fed the myth of Guevara. And the result is the same: the system grows stronger with each attempt to tear it down.

IV. How Markets Digest Their Enemies

Kaczynski taught us the system’s greatest trick decades ago. Yet the lesson is unlearned. So much for teaching.

The Che Guevara T-shirt is more than a cultural artifact. It is a lesson in how capitalist systems metabolize opposition. The shirt sells because it condenses rebellion into a wearable brand. It requires no reading of history, no sympathy for guerrilla warfare, no engagement with Marxist theory. It works precisely because it strips the man of substance and leaves only the silhouette.

The same digestion is happening with AI slop discourse. The phrase AI slop has already become aesthetic shorthand. It signals that the speaker values quality, hates mediocrity, and believes in a lost golden age of content. This makes it a useful label to slap on newsletters, books, courses, and commentary. Everyone wants to be the one who sees through the slop. It’s a crowded business.

Yet the mass production of slop criticism hasn’t slowed AI development. It hasn’t reversed the incentives. And it hasn’t improved the quality of human output. Like the Che shirt, it reinforces the same system it claims to critique. Its power, such as it is, lies in being known, not in being effective.

Worse, the lifecycle of the Guevara shirt suggests that AI slop slop is here to stay. It will persist as a recognizable format. It may be mocked, yes, but it will also be understood. It will join the catalog of things that are known to be ridiculous but remain in circulation anyway.

People don’t stop buying the shirt. They smirk while doing it.

V. The Future Belongs to Slop

If the AI can outperform you with zero training, then… It ain’t the slop, is it?

The long tail of the Che Guevara T-shirt offers a grim forecast. There was no uprising of clarity, no return to substance, no mass rejection of commodified rebellion. The image endured, hollowed out and mass-produced, because it worked. The same will happen to AI content.

AI slop is not a mistake. It is an emergent layer of the internet’s new ecology. It thrives because it is cheap, abundant, and good enough. It will not go away because it offends the sensibilities of a dwindling class of essayists. These people will eventually be repackaged as artisanal writers. Their bios will read like food labels: “handcrafted,” “human-made,” “sourced from a real person.”

Their work will not disappear. It will be marginalized, then aestheticized. A human voice will be a branding point, not a guarantee of quality. The slop will continue to dominate, and in time, even the handwritten will become formulaic, its quirks repeated by those who imitate its tone.

Meanwhile, AI slop slop will spike, then fade. It will become a recognizable phase, then a stale genre, then a dormant category. Its power lies in novelty, and novelty dies fast in a machine-paced world. Like Che’s face, it will remain visible but inert. A cultural reflex that becomes a vestigial response.

The dominance of AI content is not reversible. Its detractors have failed to preserve the high ground. Their critiques have been absorbed and automated. The outcome is settled. The machines will write. The humans will curate.

VI. The Only Honest Response

Use AI but never lie.

The only winning move is to stop pretending this isn’t happening. LLMs are now part of the creative ecosystem. They aren’t leaving. And their detractors are not prophets. They’re copywriters clinging to a monopoly they no longer hold. Denial masquerading as critique is still denial.

The wise response is to learn the tool. Mastery doesn’t mean abandonment of craft. It means commanding the new instrument with intent. Those who write well can write better with it. Those who produce well can produce faster. The key is curation.

There is no integrity in using AI and calling it something else. Doing so pollutes the fragile human-made tier with false signals. It lies about what the work is and who made it. This is the same bait-and-switch that corporations perform when they slap “locally-sourced” on factory-farmed slop. It’s parasitic and cowardly.

The rule is simple: if it was generated, say so. Don’t hide behind a style you can no longer own. Don’t disguise automation as intuition. There is no virtue in passing off machine work as personal insight. The real distinction in this age isn’t between slop and art. It’s between clarity and concealment.

AI slop slop is a dead end. There’s no need to argue with it. Learn the machine. Use it well. Say what you used. And move forward. The market has chosen its direction. It will always choose the machine.

Either walk in daylight, or get buried under the output.