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← Writing

Opinion · No. 01

Nobody ever called it

Word slop.

Spellcheck was a tool. Why is AI a confession?

David Acton · 5 min read · 1 November 2026

P

ost anything with a bit of thought behind it these days and someone will decide a machine wrote it. Too tidy. Too structured. Used a dash. Must be AI.

The suspicion isn’t paranoid. Merriam-Webster made “slop” its 2025 word of the year, defining it as low-quality digital content churned out in volume by AI. One study estimated that 54% of long-form LinkedIn posts were likely AI-generated as of October 2024, and those posts got 45% less engagement. AI detectors aren’t perfect, and they’re easy to get round, so treat that as a rough number. But the direction is clear. Ninety-three per cent of marketers now use AI to create or help with content, up from 87% the year before.¹

Here’s the awkward part. When people don’t know a piece was written with AI, they often prefer it. Tell them it was, and trust drops sharply. One study of more than 27,000 people found that revealing AI involvement in creative writing lowered how much readers valued it, whatever the quality, and the effect held for over a year.²,³

So most people are using it, most readers assume it, and the label alone costs you.

That leaves one honest conclusion. If people are going to think it’s AI anyway, that can’t be what decides whether you speak. The only question left is the one that always mattered: is it worth saying?

Nobody said MSWord slop

Think back to the first time spellcheck put a red line under a word. Millions of people who never got on with grammar at school suddenly had a way past the red pen. So did dyslexic writers, and people writing in their second language. Their points got through without being marked down for the spelling.

Did anyone say their opinion counted for less because Word fixed their “recieve”? No. We called it a tool, and we judged the point.

We’ve had this argument before

Design is a good place to look, because it’s had this fight more than once. Signs were painted by hand. Posters came off print presses, with type set letter by letter. Then in 1985 Apple’s LaserWriter printer arrived, followed that summer by Aldus PageMaker, which quickly became the standard for desktop publishing.⁴

Every time, the new tool was “not real” until it became the standard.

In its early years, desktop publishing got a bad reputation because of untrained users. Sound familiar? But it also created more demand for skilled designers who knew how to use the tools well. Adobe later bought PageMaker and replaced it with InDesign in 1999. In time, the software that was supposed to kill graphic design became the definition of it. Photography got the same treatment from painters in the 1800s.⁵

Every time, the new tool was “not real” until it became the standard. So if we’re going to judge work by the vehicle that produced it, we have to be consistent. We’d have to go back and disqualify every innovation that built the industry. Nobody wants to do that, because deep down we know the vehicle was never the point.

The value is in the eye

A designer friend of mine put it better than I can. AI can do some great stuff, he said; the problem is that a lot of people don’t know what good design looks like.

That’s the real gap. You could know every function in Photoshop and still make something awful. Photoshop just forced you to learn it before you could make anything, so a lot of bad work never left the building. AI asks you to learn nothing first, so bad work arrives faster and in bulk.

That’s what slop is. It doesn’t prove the tool’s bad. It proves that taste and skill haven’t caught up with access. Writing works the same way: the tool can give you structure, but it can’t give you a point.

How I actually work

Since I’m asking you to be honest about your process, here’s mine.

I don’t think well sitting down. My ideas turn up when I’m out walking the dogs, so I talk into my phone, rambling and going round in circles. Later I sit down and shape them. And yes, AI helps me turn a messy transcript into something with a structure.

At school I refused to write. Not because I had nothing to say, but because I couldn’t get them onto the page in one piece. The thoughts were always there and they made perfect sense. What I lacked was a way out for them. Fear of half an argument making me look stupid turned into a stubborn silent protest. I’d muted myself for fear of judgement because I couldn’t bridge the gap.

So here’s the question. Does needing a different route onto the page mean I have less right to the opinion at the end of it?

The fair objection

The pushback’s fair, and it deserves a straight answer: “But people just type ‘write me a post about the finance industry’ and paste whatever comes out.”

Take the AI away. Is there still a point?

Yes, they do, and that’s slop. But look at why. There was nothing in it to begin with: no experience, no stance, no point. The AI didn’t remove the thinking because there wasn’t any thinking to remove.

That’s where I’d draw the line. Using AI to capture, structure, tidy and edit your own idea is a tool doing what tools do. Using AI to supply the idea, the opinion and the experience is outsourcing the one part that was ever worth reading.

Here’s a simple test: take the AI away. Is there still a point? If there is, the tool helped you say it. If there isn’t, no tool was going to save it.

The people using it most seem to agree. Eighty-nine per cent of marketers now check AI output by hand, and two-thirds only trust AI writing once a person has reviewed it.⁶

Where this leaves us

I don’t think AI’s the problem. I think we adopted it backwards. We reached for it as a replacement for thinking, when its real value is as a way of getting thinking out. The skill now isn’t knowing which buttons to press. It’s having something to say, and the taste to know when you’ve said it well.

Which brings me back to the start. If you’ve got a point, an experience or an opinion that’s yours, fear of someone muttering “AI” is the worst possible reason to keep it to yourself.

They’ll probably think it anyway, so you might as well say it.

David Acton

Founder of MBS. I write for commercial finance brokers and advisory firms.

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