You can't tell the difference between AI Slop and great content in your job? Consider another profession.

There is something happening in all kinds of business contexts, but most prevalent in the expensive content business, aka consulting: a lot of mediocre content (AI slop) is being generated by AI tools, prompted without competence (or even without a clue) by hapless consultants. Sometimes, even those with deep expertise in a field are not using AI in a way that augments them, which results in more mediocre AI content. But AI slop created and spread by experts is very confusing, because it looks bad but is implicitly considered good given its origins.

In other words, the training set for Slop vs. Not Slop is very noisily labeled. If you can't assign your own label to a piece of content (a report, a slide deck, an analysis), then perhaps you should consider another job. That is because knowing what good looks like is becoming a high-value skill in a world where infinite content can be generated without human effort. BTW, the same goes for other domains, for example chemistry or materials science, where you can generate an infinite number of objects that look ok but have no value.

And then there is the great content with unique and valuable ideas created by a properly augmented expert that the confused consumer of content (the consulting client) does not recognize as valuable because they have become paranoid about AI slop and can no longer (if they ever did) recognize value. The sad truth is that while AI is turbocharging the mediocre as well as the brilliant, most people's ability to distinguish the two has plummeted. Or, more likely, that ability was never there and its absence is being revealed.

In this story, the mediocre players, be they producers or consumers, will probably Dunning-Kruger and not recognize themselves. The smarties, well, they know what I am talking about.