The problem with AI slop
Everyone is still arguing about whether AI writing is detectable while missing the bigger shift happening underneath them.
Right now, AI slop is obvious. You know it when you see it.
The blog that that starts with “In today’s fast-paced landscape...”
Too many Em-dashes on LinkedIn post.
It shows a lack of effort. But it's still identifiable. You can still tell.
That window is closing.
As tools get cheaper, faster, and better at mimicking human voice (coughs ElevenLabs) and video (coughs again HeyGen), the gap between real and generated shrinks to nothing.
The tells disappear.
The structure gets varied. The tone gets trained. The slop gets smarter.
In a few months, you won’t be able to spot AI slop by seeing it. You’ll just not know.
And that’s when the real problem starts.
The Real Crisis Isn't Quality. It's Trust.
When you can't tell the difference between human-crafted and AI-generated, you stop trusting either.
This is already happened in the past.
People don't read reviews the same way anymore.
They assume the 5 star ratings are gamed.
They've learned that polished equals suspicious.
Trust is becoming the scarcest resource.
Here's What May Happen Next
When everything looks the same, the different becomes valuable.
It happened with watches.
Smartwatches went mainstream and suddenly analog had a revival.
Digital cameras got too clean and everyone started craving Polaroids.
Fast fashion made every closet look identical and handcrafted became the premium signal.
If history repeats, and it usually does, AI content will become the new fast fashion. Everywhere. Indistinguishable. And quietly ignored.
The question isn’t whether trust becomes scarce.
It’s who’s building it before everyone else figures that out.
Three places where it’s already happening.
1. Founder brand and employee brand:
Organic social is becoming the company's most valuable marketing asset. HubSpot built a media machine around its people. Lovable is growing on the back of its unfiltered building-in-public content.
Buyers are watching, reading, and forming opinions long before a sales conversation ever starts. Our job here is to find the genuine story, the real conviction, the opinions that might make some people uncomfortable, and get it out consistently.
Over-engineered posts get ignored. Real ones get shared.
2. Experiential events:
Dinners, roundtables, curated gatherings where the organizer has thought hard about who belongs in the room together.
The magic is simple: you cannot fake presence. An hour at the right dinner does more trust-building than a 60 page whitepaper. Marketers who create and own these moments, rather than just sponsoring someone else's.
3. Communities:
The most trusted conversations in B2B are happening in places no brand has access to. Independent WhatsApp groups. Private Slack communities. Discord servers where practitioners talk to each other without a company moderating the thread.
You can’t buy your way in. You can’t automate your way in. The only way in is to be good enough that someone else brings you up.
Which is exactly why it matters.
Welcome to Trust Economy
While everyone is scrambling to keep up with the latest tools and AI updates, the real game is about building something that can’t be replicated by anyone with a good prompt. That means making the case internally for slower work.
Founder brand takes months. Good events take planning and real relationships.
None of it shows up in the short-term dashboard.
All of it compounds in ways that become very hard to compete with.
And the window to build it is smaller than we all think.
Yours Promptly,
Manu