We’ve got a really weird situation in this technology-infused world. Everything can happen instantly; you can have an idea and turn it into a reality in moments. For a few decades now companies have been selling services to help people get their ideas online, fast ways to build websites, fast ways to sell products, whatever.
Even the original promise of social media was really just “we can help you get your ideas online faster” - MySpace was about creating a page, not about posting every activity. It’s where you shared your ideas and the things you found interesting, not where you shared where you were going for dinner. Geocities was a way to have a website quickly. Today, wix will sell you a website, or squarespace, or wordpress, and it’s all turnkey. Anyone can sell you a storefront. YouTube offers you your own infinite amount of TV stations.
AI can generate any image for you. AI can generate a story or a technical document based on your concept. AI can be on the website you can deploy instantly with wix or whatever else.
Created instantly by Grok Imagine using just the concept of one-legged space chickens from space attacking. Naturally Grok gave the chickens two legs, but hey, nothing’s perfect the first time.
Everything can happen instantly, so you can get your ideas to reality in moments.
But there are two problems with this. First, as we see above, and see with any turnkey website builder, the quickly-produced output is often adequate but also nearly never right. Second, the speed at which these ideas can become reality truncates how much time we have to spend on the idea.
Standardization
People are worried about AI slop, but we’ve had template-slop all over the internet for a long time already. Standardization is how you get to fast production of anything, and in many ways standardization is a great thing. Having standardized layouts of websites makes them searchable and more accessible. People can spend more time looking at your idea than figuring out how to get to your idea.
But in many other, less visible and definitely insidious ways, standardization in creative domains is pretty terrible. Human ideas are not always standard, they don’t fit in the same boxes that other ideas fit in. By leveraging the quick and easy path we conform our ideas to the box; such as accepting that space chickens can have two legs. We end up with a “good enough” mindset, a malaise that keeps our unique ideas from presenting with the uniqueness that they could.
Or, worse, when we have ideas that don’t fit into the standardized tools available, we abandon them immediately, because spending time doing something that doesn’t fit is never worth it.
Speed
The less obvious and more destructive problem of this quick idea-to-reality world is the fact it can happen so quickly. The pure speed of getting the ideas out means that the previously forced time of refining an idea is gone; slower “time-to-market” is now seen as a weakness to be destroyed, whereas that friction previously gave us time to think about and refine our ideas.
If Grok couldn’t generate my image in under 5 seconds, I may have thought about if the chickens needed space helmets. Or maybe I would have decided that space chickens can have two legs - but as it worked out, the tool did the idea refinement for me, instead of me thinking it through myself.
We’ve seen this same pattern throughout time; tools make things happen faster mostly because it makes things the same, either via convention or intentional templating. See PageMaker’s Foley.
Slop
The issue with AI slop isn’t the AI itself. It’s that ideas come to reality too fast. It’s slop because the idea behind it hasn’t been refined, detail hasn’t been added, the concepts haven’t been explored - not because it was AI generated. We used to have the exact same complaints about low-effort, quick-to-market magazines and fictional stories. It was called “pulp fiction” because it was so cheap and quick it was printed on cheap, pulp, paper.
We’ve had slop long before we had AI, it’s a product of automation and speed to market - a product of not thinking it all the way through - not a product of this specific new technology.
Manufacturing Things versus Ideas
When time-to-market is everything - when pushing out products on a timeline is the most important thing - quality and refinement no longer matter as much. With physical products, this approach has been amazing. The industrial revolution taught us how to make adequate products at scale, and those super-efficiently-made products produced at-scale have definitely enriched the world. There are non-trivial downsides, but industrialization has made life better for basically all of humanity. There’s tons of room to talk about this on it’s own, but that’s not this article.
What I’m here to discuss is what happens when that time-to-market, adequate solution, industrial revolution concept is applied to ideas.
We come up with our best ideas when we take the time to think about it and refine it; when we strive for quality and completeness instead of how fast we can get our idea published. Our current world, though, encourages coming at manufacture and publishing of ideas in an industrial revolution style.
Get those ideas out the door as soon as possible! Don’t overthink it, just get it into the wild and see what the response is, then iterate!
The approach to ideation right now is to come up with as many ideas as you can, manifest them quickly, and “throw spaghetti at the walls and see what sticks.” We’re actively discouraged to think beyond the MVP (Minimum Viable Product). “You can always iterate later.”
Spending time simply thinking about things is seen as unproductive - and, my goodness, never allow yourself to just sit and be bored. Hustle is all that matters.
We’re coming up with one-liners and then using tools to turn those ideas into reality while they aren’t even half-baked, because of the false promise that a one-line concept could be the next Uber.
What it’s doing
The rise of technology - software, automation, the internet, AI, all of it - has accelerated slop in a way that may be fundamentally damaging humanity. Our ideas and concepts are being born, judged, and executed (as in performed or killed) before we’ve taken any time to get to know them.
Because we can take these one-line ideas and turn them into something almost instantly, we’re forgetting how to imagine and how to fully explore our own ideas. We’re creating and doing things before we’ve even explored if we want to create or do those things, or if those things will bring us any fulfillment.
Humanity is busier than it ever has been, but nobody’s happy. Nobody is allowed to take the time to be bored, think things through, and come up with an idea they truly feel are worth manifesting. Bringing a concept to reality is one of the biggest ways for a human to feel fulfilled, but we no longer allow people to develop full concepts. They have to move when it’s a one-liner or give up.
If someone does fight the time-to-market mentality and actually spends time developing a concept they want to manifest, they are in for a different set of pain. They end up needing to conform to a set of existing standards and tools, because any non-standard path is a waste of time - so the manifestation of their great idea is hampered by the realities of the templated, generated, time-to-market-optimized world we are in.
The best idea ends up being another wix website - one of billions no one will ever read - and the standardization and loss of nuance makes the whole effort lose the uniqueness and humanity it could have had. The effort itself and the end product has no chance of feeling truly fulfilling to the person who created it. The idea is mangled by the efficiencies (and inefficiencies) modern life requires.
But ideation and creativity has always been hard! This is nothing new!
No, this is new. We’ve pivoted from having an idea, exploring that idea, and figuring out how to manifest it - and being fulfilled by that whole process - to ideas going straight to a to-do list. It’s no longer about the journey, we can skip straight to the destination - and that makes for an impressive resumé but no actual, fulfilling experience.
How bad is it?
People are struggling to plan and execute normal day-to-day life.
If you are used to being able to generate a complete story, or functional software code, or images, or videos - from a one-line idea… if you are never bored and never need to think about anything too deeply… how are you going to be able to plan a complex day or a week? How can you be expected to envision your life 20 years from now, much less come up with a way to get there?
People are turning to AI to manage their calendars for them. Figuring out what you should do when, even recommending what local events you should go to, etc…
https://reclaim.ai/ https://littlebird.ai https://www.ohai.ai https://www.getclockwise.com
It’s not about ideas, concepts, exploration, creation or fulfillment anymore. It’s about how fast we can put together a to-do list, and then showing off how much we got done off the list… and expecting that will make us happy.
People blame social media, and being able to easily show off your accomplishments is part of the problem - but the bigger part of the problem is that we no longer value personal challenge or journey. We’re industrial-revolution-focused on getting from idea to manifestation as efficiently as possible, not realizing that the checkbox isn’t the journey.
We’re told that going on a guided tour to the peak of Mount Everest is the same as climbing it. It’s not. Climbing your local rock wall is more fulfilling.
Time-to-market is not the answer, technology is not the answer, fame on social media is not the answer. Boredom is the answer. Get bored. Think things through. Then make it happen in your own way.