AI & Business
The Slop Machine
Why AI Makes So Much Worthless Stuff, and How to Build the Useful Kind
The hard question was never could. It was should.
We built something close to a miracle and pointed most of it at making more. More content, more apps, more emails no one will read. There is a word for what comes out, and it reached the dictionaries in 2025: slop.
Here is the uncomfortable part. The problem was never quality. It is that nobody wanted the thing in the first place, and now it can be made without limit. Most of what AI produces is not low value. It is negative value: it costs more to wade through, check, and clean up than it ever cost to generate.
The Slop Machine is the operator's case for judgement in an age that made judgement feel optional. Sotiris Spyrou runs an AI consultancy and uses these tools every working day. He is not a doomer and not a booster. Inside: what slop really is and why it carries negative value, the should test (four plain questions to run on any AI project before you commit a person, a budget, or a launch date), an honest chapter on where AI genuinely earns its place, how to use these tools every day without producing slop yourself, and what to do on Monday, whether you build things, fund them, or run them.