I Report AI Slop. I’m Not Sorry.

I report AI slop on LinkedIn. Pretty regularly, actually.

You know the stuff I’m talking about. The strange AI-generated graphics. The impossible hands. The overly polished people who somehow look like they’ve never experienced a human emotion. The inspirational images that vaguely resemble reality until you look at them for more than three seconds.

When I see it, I report it.

And I’m going to keep doing it.

Not because I hate AI. I don’t. I use AI. I talk about AI. I teach people how to think differently about AI. I think it’s one of the most interesting shifts happening in how we work.

But somewhere along the way, access to AI became permission to stop caring about what we put into the world.

I don’t think it should be.

We Didn’t Accept This Before

This is the part I keep coming back to.

Before generative AI, if a brand posted a truly terrible graphic, we noticed. If the design was sloppy, we noticed. If the stock photography was bizarre or the creative looked cheap, we noticed.

There were standards.

Not everything had to be an award-winning campaign. Not every LinkedIn graphic needed an art director and a six-figure budget. But there was an expectation that somebody had looked at the thing before publishing it and asked:

Is this good?

Now we seem to have replaced that question with:

Can AI make this for me?

Those are not the same question.

Being able to generate something in thirty seconds doesn't automatically make that thing worth sharing.

AI lowered the barrier to creation. Somehow, we let it lower the bar for creativity at the same time.

I Feel a Moral Pull Toward Good Design

That probably sounds dramatic. I’m okay with that. I genuinely believe good creative matters. Design affects how we feel about things. Photography matters. Art direction matters. Typography matters. The weird little details somebody obsessed over that most people will never consciously notice? Those matter too. There is something deeply human about caring how something looks, feels, and lands with another person.

That’s why I feel such a pull toward good design. And maybe even more importantly, toward the people who are good at creating it.

Creative directors. Designers. Photographers. Illustrators. Writers. Brand people. The people who understand that creativity isn't just producing an asset. It's making choices.

• They bring taste.

• They bring context.

• They know when something feels wrong before they can even explain why.

• They can take a half-formed idea in someone's head and turn it into something that makes another person stop scrolling.

• That skill did not become less valuable because we got a prompt box.

If anything, I think it became more valuable.

AI Isn’t the Standard

AI is a tool. It can help us brainstorm. Explore concepts. Move faster. Create drafts. Test directions. Get unstuck. But AI should not be the creative standard. Our taste should be.

The question shouldn't be whether ChatGPT, Claude, Canva, or whatever tool comes next can make the thing. The question should be whether the thing deserves to exist.

• Does it say something?

• Does it feel intentional?

• Does it look like someone cared?

• Does it add anything to a feed already drowning in content?

Because we're entering an era where making more content is going to be unbelievably easy. Making something worth paying attention to is going to become harder. And that's exactly why taste matters now. That's why creative direction matters now. That's why good design matters now. AI can give us infinite output. It can't give us a reason to care.

So yes, when I see obvious AI slop clogging up my LinkedIn feed, I'm probably going to report it.

Not because AI made it.

Because somewhere between the prompt and the publish button, nobody stopped to ask whether it was actually good.

And I still think good should be the standard.

Maybe even more.

PARTY ON. AMBUSH.