AI is not inherently slop

I recently had a small discussion on the use of AI in a subreddit. I won’t share which one here, as that’s not the point. I am truly grateful for our moderators in their persistence and consistency in following their rules. They gracefully spent some time explaining to me why my posts were taken down. I think they are doing great and I appreciate them all.

There is a rule on some subreddits:

No AI art/writing.

I agree, AI slop is terrible. However, this rule catches all AI content. I think we need to define what AI slop is. I agree AI produced art is less than human and you can just tell. AI generated apps rarely work as desired, it takes a product mindset to make them work.

AI isn’t inherently slop. There are so many tools all of us use that are empowered with AI as assistance: chances are your email app is using AI to summarize your emails, speech to text apps, social apps, games, many image editing tools, and oodles more. If their assistance is less than optimal, you can change it.

Then there’s the slop producers…

We all know what that means and what that can look like: yucky images, writing like no human ever writes, those annoying — emdashes, messy code that barely works, etc. You know it when you see it. I call AI slop anything AI produces without human review and critique. If you go to your favorite app, have it create something, then share it. Slop.

I use AI consistently as an assistant: I use it to come up with app design ideas and approaches, spending sometimes days just walking through game play and requirements before writing a line of code; discuss ideal mechanics of the app I want to build; iterate on the app experience; have it create starter visuals that I spend iterations on my own time cleaning up (I am no designer); research feature ideas, what can work and what wouldn’t; and of course, writing my code. I do not refer to any of this as AI slop.

I, the human, am still very much involved in critiquing the final output to make it what I want it to look and act like, not just letting AI produce it and moving forward.

Personally, using AI tools has helped me bring to life a lot of the cool ideas that I have bouncing around in my head (ADD fun), and dismiss some that were terrible ideas before spending time building it. If I had to write everything from scratch, I would still be on my first game. I am working on 2 other ideas now, thanks to AI. This is the power of AI: it allows us to realize our vision and dreams so much faster, when it’s done correctly. I do not let AI own my solution. I use it as my tool.

Before simply dismissing AI content, we should keep in mind minority groups, for example disabled people or those who don’t speak our language. AI is a huge help for those who rely on it to contribute. It would be a shame that they would feel like outcasts because they can’t physically type or speak the language and have to rely on AI. Imagine telling your autistic child that their output doesn’t count because they didn’t produce the entire thing themselves.

Here at Aurebesh Files, we use AI to assist us. We research Star Wars with it. We modify imagery to clean it up. We brainstorm. We generate quality apps with it. None of this is AI slop, it’s simply using the tools at our finger tips to work smarter.

If you’d like to discuss, please do! Find us on Threads (preferred), Bluesky, or X (meh) and let us know what you think!

MTFBWY

P.S. if it’s not obvious, this was not written by AI :*