Your AI Is Only as Good as Your Taste: Why 'Slop' Is a Process Problem, Not a Tool Problem

The word has lost all meaning — so let's give it some back.

Somewhere along the way, “slop” became the internet’s favorite word for anything AI has touched. A book written with AI assistance? Slop. A cover designed with Midjourney? Slop. An author who spent years on a manuscript but used AI to help with editing? Believe it or not — also slop.

The word has been stretched so thin that it’s become almost meaningless. And I think that’s worth talking about, because the actual problem it’s supposed to describe — low-quality, careless content — is real. But this is not a new problem, and it isn’t unique to AI.

Slop Is Not New

Guess what? Humans have been producing slop for as long as there’s been a market to sell into. Capitalism has driven a lot of bad creative decisions over the years, and AI didn’t invent a single one of them.

I don’t want to call out anyone specific — that’s not the point and it’s not my style. But you’ve seen it. We all have. Rushed stories that “borrow” a little too heavily from whatever’s trending. Published first drafts where the main character changes names halfway through, or their hair color shifts between chapters because nobody bothered to do a continuity pass. Cover art that looks like it was made with the artist’s non-dominant hand and fifteen minutes of effort. Books that hit “publish” before they were anywhere close to ready, because the goal was speed to market, not quality.

There are millions of books in the Kindle store right now that have fallen into the abyss — not because AI touched them, but because the author didn’t have the craft, the care, or the taste to make something readers would come back for. That was true in 2015, it was true in 2020, and it’s true today. The tools have changed. The underlying problem hasn’t.

The Word Has Lost All Meaning

What frustrates me about the current “slop” discourse isn’t the concept — it’s the weaponization.

I see authors who wrote every word of their book, spent years working on it, and get called slop producers because they let an AI help them with editing or marketing copy. I see genuinely well-crafted stories and artwork get slammed not because they’re bad, but because an AI was involved somewhere in the process. I’ve even seen authors get dogpiled because they used a word in their writing that AI models also use frequently — as if certain vocabulary is now off-limits to humans.

It’s maddening. The lengths people will go to in order to put down other authors instead of minding their own business genuinely baffles me. “Slop” has stopped being a quality descriptor and started being a tribal marker. It no longer means “this is bad.” It means “this person used a tool I don’t approve of.” And, y’all, that’s gatekeeping. Plain and simple.

The Difference Between Slop and Craft Is Care

The “everything AI is slop” crowd doesn’t want to reckon with the truth: two authors can use the exact same AI tool — same model, same subscription, same access — and produce wildly different results. If the tool were the problem, that wouldn’t be possible. But it happens every single day.

So what’s the difference?

It comes down to decisions. And decisions come from taste.

Author A made choices along the way to prioritize reader expectations, genre tropes, immersive writing, and the kind of emotional experience that makes someone leave a five-star review and immediately buy the next book. Author B just wanted to get something readable to market as fast as possible without much thought about whether that book actually landed with anyone.

I want to be careful here, because speed isn’t the problem. I know plenty of authors who produce fast and care deeply about their readers. They make quick decisions, but they’re informed decisions — grounded in craft knowledge, genre awareness, and genuine respect for the people who are going to read the thing. Speed and care are not opposites.

The slop producers are the ones trying to create a minimally viable product and shove it to market without caring what’s actually inside the book. That’s a care problem. That’s a process problem. That is not a tool problem.

Taste Is the Irreplaceable Ingredient

Tanya Hales, who joined me and Danica on Episode 67 of Brave New Bookshelf, talked about “human taste” being the one thing AI can’t replace. And Coral Hart, on Episode 64, was refreshingly blunt about the fact that AI gives you a “rubbish first draft” — and it’s your job to make it human again. Both of them are right.

But what even is taste? I think about this a lot, and here’s where I’ve landed: taste is the accumulated instinct you develop from years of reading, writing, receiving feedback, and being willing to hear hard truths about your own work. It’s the thing that lets you read a sentence and feel — in your gut, before your brain even catches up — whether it belongs or not.

Honestly, not everyone has developed that instinct. There are a lot of authors, with or without AI, who haven’t opened themselves to the kind of literary criticism that sharpens taste over time. And that’s a personal choice, but it has consequences for the quality of what you produce.

My own taste runs toward immersive characters and worlds I want to spend time in. That’s what I read, and it’s what I write. The readers who share my taste keep coming back book after book, and that’s not an accident — it’s the result of years of developing and trusting my instincts about what makes a story work. AI doesn’t replace that process. It amplifies whatever you bring to the table, for better or worse. If your taste is sharp, AI helps you move faster. If your taste isn’t there yet, AI will happily produce mediocre content at scale, and it won’t warn you that it’s doing it.

Craft Knowledge Makes AI Harder, Not Easier

Here’s my spicy take, and I stand by it completely: using AI without craft knowledge actually makes your job harder, not easier. If you don’t know what good looks like — if you can’t identify weak dialogue, flat pacing, or a character arc that goes nowhere — you can’t steer the AI toward something better. You’ll accept what it gives you because you don’t have the framework to push back.

The authors who are doing the best work with AI right now are overwhelmingly the ones who already understood story structure, reader psychology, and the fundamentals of their genre before they ever opened an AI tool. The technology didn’t make them good. It made them faster.

You can absolutely use AI and produce high-quality work and care deeply about craft. Those things are not in conflict. In fact, I’d argue that AI-assisted writing done well demands more editorial awareness than writing without it, because you’re constantly evaluating, steering, and making judgment calls about output you didn’t generate yourself. That takes skill.

As for my own quality bar? I know a draft has crossed from “AI-assisted” to “this is mine” when I get sucked in and can’t stop reading my own work. When I forget I’m editing and just... read. That’s the test. It’s not scientific, but it’s never been wrong.

The Real Question

If you put craft and care into your story — if you’re writing something you genuinely enjoy, something you believe your readers will love and rave about — then it’s not slop. It doesn’t matter how much AI was involved. The presence of AI in your process does not determine the quality of what comes out the other end. You determine that. Your taste. Your care. Your decisions.

The word “slop” should mean something. It should describe content that was produced without thought, without craft, and without any regard for the person who’s going to consume it. That definition has nothing to do with which tools were used to make it and everything to do with the human behind those tools.

So the next time someone throws “slop” at a piece of work just because AI was part of the process, ask yourself: are they actually evaluating the quality? Or are they just mad about the method?

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What’s your personal quality bar? How do you know when something has crossed from “draft” to “done”? I’d love to hear how you think about taste and care in your own work — tell me in the comments.