Back before the pandemic, when I was running a writing agency, I once ordered five blog articles for $1.99 on a lark. The idea was I’d pay for the slop and write an article about the experience — as a warning to anyone considering doing the same for their business.

I spent half my waking hours trying to convince project managers and potential clients that good writing was worth paying for back then, that their voices were as important as their websites. As I’m no longer running the agency, you can see who won that battle.

We survived COVID and it’s 2022 and the same project managers who’d never really come around to the idea of paying for writing can have ChatGPT write a hundred articles for nothing. Or anything else: a video script, an onboarding email, a whole website for nada. Hot days.

But I was no longer a copywriting evangelist in 2022. I’d moved on. The outfit I was writing for at the time had planted a firm flag in the slop when the spigot had just started dripping. They wouldn’t do AI, they said. Like many of us, they slapped it up on their website for everyone to see.

That lasted a year or two — until their human garbage (I was writing about home security) started to get its ass kicked, whether by a tide of faceless, remorseless, self-propagating LLM garbage, or by Google’s AI overviews, I’ve never been sure.

I’m not saying I refused to polish AI slop for forty bucks an hour. I was just very bad at it. Me and the company, we went our separate ways.

Now, in 2026, I’m beginning to think the last decent copywriting gig may have gone the way of Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse, or the dodo.

All that is to say, I have skin in this game.

And yet, as a writer who spends shamefully large chunks of his free time tinkering with HTML and CSS, I need to say this: please, no more essays by developers lamenting AI slop. No more battle cries to build personal websites as if that’s the antidote to the enshittification of the web.

Friends, like the clogged toilet of Silicon Valley from which all the truly nasty shit is flowing, I’m clogged with “think pieces” and hacktivism lamenting a technology very few, if any, of us really understand, promising a rosier future on VS Code.

You should feel this way, too. I’ll tell you why.

It’s trite

I’m tired of other humans telling me to beware the slop.

The slop sucks. The slop is terrifying and may put me out of a job. The slop is also perpetuating some very horrible power imbalances on other humans. Read Kate Crawford’s awesome Atlas of AI if you haven’t.

But slapping a “made by humans” badge up on your website and linking it to a webring of more human websites is doing less than you need to combat the slop, if you need to do something.

You’re human. Fine. So are the underpaid Turkers in Bangalore sowing LLM metadata like piecework.

So is the Black woman whose face Gemini can’t identify.

If your activism ends with being human, maybe think a little deeper on the subject. Because, not to be too cynical, the digital pieceworkers in Bangalore probably aren’t losing too much sleep over fueling the beast that put a writer in Sweden (that’s me) out of a job. Nor would I want them to.

You’re preaching to the choir

Obvious, right? But we already believe you. We’re suffering with you. I get why you’d feel compelled to espouse your humanity at a time like this. I even almost get why you’d construct an elaborate mini-website to do that. But a pretty site enjoining visitors to throw off the chains of capitalism to... build a personal website?

As far as I remember, from the embarrassingly many times I failed to convince people to pay me to write for them, those unconvinced cheapos were my audience, not the hack sitting next to me at the bar not getting paid. I might have lamented the state of the industry to that guy, but when it was time to sound the clarion and publish an article that actually said something, I turned the trumpet in the other direction.

This isn’t samizdat

I lived in Prague for three years in my twenties, where I spent almost all of my time at bars. Sometimes I brought books along. At one of those bars I met a former dissident who noticed my copy of Joseph Skvorecky’s “The Engineer of Human Souls,” a 600-page tome that took me a few weeks to read.

This guy told me back in the days of samizdat, when the Soviets banned books like Texans, a single copy of Skvorecky’s outlawed book made it back through the Iron Curtain from Canada, where Skvorecky had emigrated. Readers lucky enough to be on the list had a single night to read it.

That’s resistance.

Making a website from scratch so you can do you is a lot better than paying the company store at Squarespace, but it’s not risking your life to read a 600-page novel in a night.

More has to be done.

I’m just not sure what.

Why I’m optimistic

Actually, that may be stretching it.

If you’ve read Heydon Pickering’s post Poisoning the Well, this is the kind of activism we need. Pickering set up his blog to lead grubby robots.txt-ignoring bots to replicas of his posts. Except when they got there they’d find a quicksand of gibberish that mimics English... and die like dinosaurs in the tar pits of Pickering’s gobbledygook. An artist’s big fat birdie to Sam Altman. I love it.

But this may not even be necessary.

Humans have been writing slop for a long time now. I myself am a reformed slop peddler. As long as LLMs suck that shit up and regurgitate it — as long as they can’t get their binary hooks on so-called quality data — it’s just going to be slop all the way down. The well Pickering wants to poison may end up poisoning itself.

Which, again, pretty much sucks because if it’s just slop talking to slop, the web itself will dry up faster than the Salton Sea, a.k.a. Lithium Valley.

So what are you going to do about it?

Please. Do something. Anything.

Just don’t make another personal website.