"slop" is less so about if something is a popular product or not, it's more about the quality. You can think that AI can produce high quality outputs, but it's unreasonable to think that this applies to the majority of it's use. There has always been corner cutting, and using AI to cut corners/safe money in product design/production inevitably results already, and will more so in the future, in a ton of bad products. That does not mean that there can't be good ones too.
> "slop" is less so about if something is a popular product or not, it's more about the quality.
But we are talking about popular culture here. That was never an industry where quality was measured by artistic excellence. It's an industry that is entirely motivated by mass appeal. Thus something being popular IS the measure of success.
So if AI is slop, then so is 99% of the human-made content it's replacing.
Slop exists because the cost of creating content has dropped to zero, which made the signal to noise ratio crater as well. Concision and density used to be a virtue. Now it's the opposite: content is measured by weight.