Since the rise of LLMs and AI image generators, we’ve heard the term “slop” more and more, used to signal the surreal, inaccurate, unremarkable, and ubiquitous media polluting our digital experiences. Merriam-Webster even declared it Word of the Year for 2025.
In most of the conversations I have, the focus on slop is about the capabilities of AI technology. When people see slop in their feeds, they are sometimes unsettled that AI-created content is convincing enough to make them question what’s real, or they’re frustrated with the gap between their vision and AI’s capabilities. It’s important to understand the technology’s strengths and weaknesses as our industry figures out where AI is best suited to support the creative process.
But as a long-time creative and creative leader, it makes me think about something else: our standards.
Convenience vs standards
One of the exciting things about generative AI is its potential to let people produce creative work at speeds that just weren’t possible before. It’s a little mind-blowing! Faster work at higher volumes may be convenient, but that alone doesn’t make it good. Output is not the same as impact.
Likewise, just because something is made by a human doesn’t make it good, either. AI didn’t invent slop. It just scaled it. There are plenty of “quick and dirty” marketing projects that result in poor quality. We’ve all seen well-executed bad ideas that make us wonder: “What were they thinking?”
What we need to remember is that “good” creative work is actually in the eyes of the audience. Does it elicit emotions, beliefs, and actions in them?
This is the question that often gets lost when companies attempt to replace creatives with AI. And here’s the danger in it: If we only care about how quickly and cheaply things can get done, we stop optimizing for getting them done well. We actively shift our values and standards toward cost savings and away from the customer experience of our brand.
Creative stewardship
The best way to make sure creative work meets the bar and fulfills its purpose is to keep human creatives at the heart of the project. Even if AI is used to help operationalize, ideate, or execute, there are certain elements of the craft that just shouldn’t be automated.
Because tools don’t create quality. Accountability does. While AI can produce deliverables, it can’t be accountable. It ultimately bears no responsibility, suffers no consequences, and has no incentives. That’s why we need creative gatekeepers to ensure that everything created is worth putting out into the world.
Empathy is one of our greatest human strengths. On top of our own lived experience, we can imagine and care about what it might feel like from another person’s perspective. How will stakeholders feel about how the company is being portrayed? How will customers feel if the information isn’t accurate? Who are all of these people and how do we navigate the complex web of interactions between them? Our empathy helps us understand the past, predict the future, and navigate complexity with nuance.
Speaking of nuance, our intuitive ability to curate is a marketing team or agency’s greatest tool. The product isn’t the content alone–it’s the judgment system around it: knowing what’s relevant, impactful, on brand, trending, and ready to ship. No matter how good our tools get, teams will only be as good as their ability to identify slop from spark.
When you have a team with highly refined empathy and curation skills, that taste shows up in what you publish–and what you don’t. It shows up in a consistent point of view (that your customers actually recognize).
Better. Faster. Human-led.
Every day, AI becomes increasingly capable of giving you exactly what you want. And that is the root of the problem. AI will fail to rise above the slop without these human skills, because we are the ones who challenge assumptions and maintain the integrity of the relationship between a brand and its customers.
To be clear, I’m not anti-AI. I believe it has a very big role in helping us get to great ideas faster. DCG ONE even has an R&D team dedicated to building our point of view, processes, and policies together–because if we can’t use AI responsibly, it’s not really an innovation. The main lesson we’ve learned from that work so far is that AI doesn’t replace humans. It doesn’t work without us.
Our standards. Our processes. Our point of view. Our craft and curation. Our accountability. In short: the friction of our better judgment.
In the AI era, the winners won’t be the brands that churn out the most content. It will be the ones that create operational efficiency to support human craft and connection. If you’re wondering what that means for your marketing, contact us. We’d love to compare notes on what it means to be a human-led, AI-enabled marketing team.