Happy Friday Storytellers,
Ten years ago, I spoke at Content Marketing World for the first time, and it’s been one of my favorite events on earth ever since. It’s a mecca for business storytelling nerds, and one of the warmest and most generous communities you’re ever going to find.
I’m headed back this October to deliver an in-depth, interactive session on how to develop breakthrough storytelling IP, and you should come. This year’s event is on an entirely new level, with two Summits hosted by LIONS (home of the Cannes Lions Festival) and speakers like Sophia Bush and Gabrielle Union.
Register here to get $200 off with Code Lazer200, and DM me when you do. I’d love to host a meetup for Storytelling Edge subscribers.
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Message Slop’d
Recently, I was working on a project with someone, and they sent me an email. Immediately, I knew I was in trouble.
The first sign was the font; the email had clearly been copied and pasted from another tool. It was written in that ChatGPT voice: clean but dead-behind-the-eyes, stripped of all traces of the human behind it. It was particularly obvious because it came from a smart, funny person who normally has a quirky way of writing and speaking.
The jargon-laden email made grandiose claims about the work being sent over, describing it in the excessive detail of a waiter at a five-star restaurant trying to sell you on an $80 appetizer. I held my breath and opened the attached work. It was utter gibberish.
Last year, researchers at Stanford gave a name to what I’d experienced: I’d been Workslop’d. “Workslop” is when a coworker just copy-and-pastes an output from ChatGPT or Claude that they barely read into a Google doc and sends it to you, passing along the work of figuring out what the hell ChatGPT just said. The researchers found that 40% of workers had experienced this in the past month, and it was killing their productivity.
But it wasn’t the Workslop itself that unnerved me the most—it was the emails, Slacks, and WhatsApp messages I’d been getting. Over the past few months, I’ve found myself on threads with three or four people who were all clearly copy-and-pasting from ChatGPT. It’s disorienting, like you’ve slipped into the world of Animorphs, and little alien slugs are secretly controlling everyone around you. (Except, unlike in Animorphs, I am not able to transform into a grizzly bear. I digress.)
Friends started relaying the same uncanny-valley experiences. And then last week, I discovered that writer Ryan Levesque had come up with a term for it: “Message-slop.”
Content slop. Workslop. Now, we have Message-Slop.
I posted about it on LinkedIn, and it blew up: Over 250,000 views and a flood of comments from people sharing similar experiences.
Paul Graham—founder of Y Combinator and one of the most respected people in Silicon Valley—recently wrote on X that as soon as he realizes an email from a founder was written by AI, he stops reading it. “It feels like being lied to, and who would stand for that?” he wrote.
This is a man who was an early investor in OpenAI (via Y Combinator) and has called AI the biggest opportunity for startup founders. He’s not anti-AI, but he is human, and human beings are social creatures. We want to communicate with other people, not machines, and it feels deceptive when people outsource that to AI.
Engaging in Message-slop is a subtle act of self-sabotage, although I get why people do it. We’re all overworked. We desperately want to get stuff off our plate, and AI excels at writing generic, jargony business emails. It’s like a genie trapped a smarmy Accenture engagement manager inside your computer. But it comes with hidden, underlying risks:
When you use AI to write for you, it signals that you don’t have confidence in your ability to communicate your ideas. As Graham put it: “It makes me think less of the author. It means they can’t write well unaided (or feel they can’t), and that they’re trying to trick me. It’s not impressive to use AI to write stuff for you; any teenager can do that.”
A new large-scale study of 27,000 people backs Graham up. It found that when people know a piece of text was created with AI, they rate it much more negatively and perceive it as inauthentic. Across all the studies, perceived inauthenticity most strongly correlated with the negative ratings, inferring that our dislike of AI writing is something of a social survival feature. We infer that someone is trustworthy not just by what they communicate, but how they communicate. And using AI to write feels inherently deceptive.
Stanford’s Workslop study came to a similar conclusion: “Approximately half of the people we surveyed viewed colleagues who sent workslop as less creative, capable, and reliable than they did before receiving the output. Forty-two percent saw them as less trustworthy, and 37% saw that colleague as less intelligent.”
Writing is thinking. The process of writing forces you to synthesize your thoughts and figure out what you actually think. By outsourcing important work emails to AI, you miss out on that valuable process.
As AI automates many of the technical tasks at work (data analysis, coding, administrative tasks), our value will increasingly lie in our ability to build trust and persuade other human beings. This takes practice, and every time you outsource an important piece of communication to AI, you miss out on the opportunity to improve those skills.
Sidenote: I’d argue that all of these risks also apply to using AI to post “thought leadership” on LinkedIn—a practice that has become so rampant that FORTY-ONE PERCENT of all LinkedIn posts are now fully AI-generated.
Listen, I use AI every day: Claude acts as my EA, research assistant, data analyst, and coding assistant, automating a ton of the busywork in my life so I can spend more time writing, thinking, and taking my son to the beach. I regularly run workshops that teach marketing teams how to use AI in a responsible, slop-free way. Do I think we’re in a bubble? Yes, but I also believe the underlying technology is very economically useful.
But I do think we’re seeing a clear line emerge between beneficial and detrimental uses of AI. When an AI’s output is objective—something we don’t expect to come from the voice and perspective of another human—we don’t really care if an AI made it.
That’s why AI-generated code has the positive nickname of “vibe-coding” while AI-generated content has earned the epithet of “AI Slop.”
But as the research shows, we care a LOT when it turns out that subjective content and messages are AI-generated. We inherently don’t like it, and if you study human history, this just makes sense. We evolved to judge people not just by what they say, but by how they say it. And using AI to write your messages says more than you think.
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Briefslop is the worst. In the olden days, our biggest challenge with getting a clear written brief from a client was time. They were just too busy.
Now, they can just outsource all that to their internal bot and ping! A voluminous brief jam-packed with AI-wisdom makes it way to the copywriter. And our hearts sink. And we spend even more time trying to work out exactly what problem they're trying to solve.
Wait, only 40% of workers experienced workslop in the past month? I experience it daily, and I agree -- it's so draining, so telling, and so understandably a survival mechanism for everyone struggling to keep up. I'm also guessing that number has spiked since last year's research.