AI Slop Is Real, But Let's Not Pretend the Internet Was Clean Before It

There is a lot of conversation right now about AI slop. The concern is real: generative AI makes it cheaper and faster to produce content, apps, images, and products, and some of that output is low-quality filler that clogs up the internet. I get it. I have seen it. Some of it is genuinely bad.

But here is the thing nobody seems to say out loud: the internet was already full of slop before AI showed up. A lot of it. And a significant chunk of that slop was produced deliberately, by well-funded companies, optimized specifically to extract money from you while delivering as little value as possible.

AI did not invent digital garbage. It just made the conversation about digital garbage louder. And if we are being honest, AI is also making it easier to build genuinely useful things faster than ever before. That part tends to get left out.

The App Store Is a Landfill With a Nice Icon Grid

Take a walk through the App Store or Google Play and really look at what is there. Millions of apps. A fraction of them are actually well-designed, genuinely useful, and worthy of space on your phone.

The rest? Clones of clones. Apps that exist to harvest your data. Apps with free trials that auto-convert into $12.99 a month subscriptions after 72 hours. Apps that interrupt you with a full-screen ad every three minutes. Apps that require you to create an account, verify your email, set up a profile, and complete an onboarding flow just to access a feature that should have taken 30 seconds.

None of that was built by AI. That was humans, making deliberate product and monetization decisions, prioritizing revenue capture over user experience. The slop was already here. It just wore a startup logo.

The bar for "good" has always been low. We just accepted it because we did not have a better reference point, and switching costs are high enough that most people stick with whatever they already have installed.

Travel Apps: A Case Study in Designed Uselessness

Let me give you a concrete example, because abstractions are easy to dismiss.

Travel planning apps and websites are almost universally terrible at the thing you actually need them to do: help you plan a trip. You would think that saving a flight you are considering, or pinning a hotel you want to compare later, or building out a rough itinerary across a few days would be table stakes functionality. It is not.

What most travel sites actually do is funnel you toward a purchase. Every feature, every interface decision, every piece of content is oriented around getting you to book something through their platform so they can collect an affiliate commission from the airline, hotel, or car rental company. The app is not a planning tool. It is a storefront dressed up as a planning tool.

I ran into this problem myself and eventually got frustrated enough to build something about it. The app is called VacayTok. It is completely free. You can create a trip, build it out, save the details, and share it with whoever you are traveling with. No affiliate kickbacks driving the feature decisions. No pressure to book through a partner. Just a useful trip planning tool that does what it says it does.

The point is not to pitch the app. The point is that the gap it fills should not exist. A category as large as travel planning, with billions of dollars flowing through it every year, should have produced at least a few genuinely user-first products by now. It largely has not, because the incentive structures push in the opposite direction.

What Happened to Personal Finance Software?

Here is another one that genuinely frustrates me.

Intuit basically invented consumer financial software. Quicken was transformative. Mint, for a while, was a legitimately useful product that let you connect your accounts, see your spending, and get a real picture of your financial life in one place. It was not perfect, but it was trying to solve the right problem.

Then Mint got shut down. And what replaced it, along with the broader direction of Intuit's consumer-facing products? A platform built around surfacing credit card offers. You connect your accounts, and the primary value proposition that gets marketed back to you is: "Hey, based on your spending, you might qualify for this card." The data you provide about your financial life gets used to sell you more financial products.

The useful stuff, the register, the real bank connections, the complete picture of your money in a clean interface, quietly faded.

I could not find a product that did what I actually needed, so I built one. It is called Money and Macros. The goal was simple: let someone see their complete financial picture at a glance, on their phone, in an experience that does not feel like a chore. That should not be a hard product to find. But it is, because the incentive to monetize your financial data is stronger than the incentive to build something that is just genuinely useful.

AI Is Not the Problem. Misaligned Incentives Are.

When people complain about AI slop, what they are really describing is a content and product quality problem. AI can accelerate that problem, sure. But it can also accelerate the solution.

The same tools that make it easier to spin up low-quality blog posts and copycat apps also make it easier for a small team, or a single builder, to create something genuinely useful that would have taken years and millions of dollars to build a decade ago. That is not a small thing. That is a real shift in who gets to build and what they can build.

The issue has never been the tool. It has been the intent behind it.

A travel site built to collect affiliate revenue will be useless whether it was built with AI or a team of 200 engineers. A finance app built to sell you credit cards will be frustrating regardless of how sophisticated the technology underneath it is. And on the flip side, a tool built to actually solve a real problem can be lean, fast, and useful, especially now, when the cost and time to build have dropped significantly.

The slop conversation matters. Quality matters. But let's not let nostalgia for a pre-AI internet rewrite history. The pre-AI internet had plenty of garbage. It still does. AI is one variable in a much larger equation, and it is not the most important one.

What to Actually Look For (and Expect)

If you are evaluating any digital product, AI-assisted or not, a few questions cut through most of the noise:

• Who is the actual customer here? If the app is free, figure out what they are selling. Your data, your attention, and your referral value are all products.
• Does the core feature work without an upsell? If the thing you came for is locked behind a paywall or buried under ads, the product was not built for you.
• What problem does it actually solve? Not what the marketing says. What does the product do, in practice, when you use it?
• Who built it and why? Products built out of frustration with existing options tend to be more honest about what they are trying to do than products built primarily to capture a market.

These questions work for AI-generated content too. Is the article trying to inform you or just rank for a keyword? Is the chatbot trying to help you or trying to keep you engaged on a platform? The underlying question is always the same: is this thing actually trying to be useful?

The honest answer to AI slop is not to slow down AI. It is to raise the standard for what we accept and to support the products and creators who are genuinely trying to build useful things, regardless of what tools they use to get there.

If you are building something real and want to think through how AI fits into your product, your workflow, or your business, reach out. That is exactly what Thought Spark AI is here to help with.