So. AI Slop.

Fun topic, isn’t it? Anyone you talk to seems to either discuss it as the second coming or the antichrist. It’s rare you come into contact with someone who treats it like what it is - code. Algorithms. Lines of logic run on wires. A tool that you can use in different ways and you can discuss whether it’s even feasible or reasonable to. But it’s kind of hard to have a proper conversation like that when AI is such a cornerstone of the economy and gets billions pumped into it by, let’s be real, MBAs who smell money and have zero clue how it works.

Generally we associate AI products nowadays with a marker of “low quality”, because (at the moment) creating stuff with AI is very cheap and takes little effort - anyone can do it! And everyone is doing it. To the point everyone’s shit looks the same.

I know this.

…and yet.

A few months back, my boss told me AI use has moved from being a recommendation to being mandatory, and started paying me for the 100$ per month deal of Claude Code. I’ve started outputting slop PRs for our in-house game engine written in typescript (you’ve read that right) at a staggering pace, and somehow they’re less slop than the existing code which makes zero rhyme nor reason. So I’ve gotten used at tossing stuff at the Slop Machine.

I know everything I outlined in the opening.

…and yet, I’ve been having trouble making my personal website.

Not this one, no no, but rather my professional website. The one with my actual name and face attached. The one I link to on my CV. That one.

I am not good at visual design. Like at all. Every time one of my good friends (design degree) looks at prototypes I make, he proceeds to call me over discord and call me stupid in many unique ways. So this prototype website also looked like a garish mess of non-fitting colors.

I talked to multiple friends about it, got some conflicting advice, still looked like arse. And then, my coworker told me “dude, just use AI for it. It’s fine, no one cares. It’s for work.” This far in, I went “fuck it, let’s see what the slop machine has to offer.”

And lads? It actually looked way better than my site.

…Yeah. I have the slop version up on my personal domain.

I told this to some of my friends and they wanted to strangle me, (one saying he’ll make me a website himself in the next few months, which I appreciate very much,) and a few pointing out obvious flaws in the design. My brother could even spot I made it with claude just based off of how it looked.

And now? I could understand the appeal AI had to non-coders. Something I was terrible at, quickly fixed with something I felt like I added my touch to, and had to iterate to create. I felt like I had some ownership over the result. And despite this, anyone who actually understood anything about the field I mimicked thought it looked awful, and the average person could tell I made it with AI.

I knew consciously this was why people used AI, but it was a bit… funny, I suppose, to go through that exact loop myself.

I’m not immune to bullshit and sycophancy, evidently.