If you find it hard to distinguish something written by AI or a human, don’t worry, I can’t either. Humans spent the last decade writing like machines.
Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2025/03/01/2504-human-gunk-and-the-slopocalypse/
- Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/
- Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
- Subscriber Zine! https://startselectreset.com/
Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo
Subscribe to the Podcast: https://permanentlymoved.online/
Human Gunk and the Slopocalypse
The pipes of the Internet are clogged. Not just by AI-generated slop, but something older, thicker, and harder to shift.
I’ve been thinking about this after seeing a tweet from Aaron Bastani the other day. He was talking about a news story, it struck me that the problem isn’t just the existence of bad journalism, or bad writing, or any of the other symptoms of the endless content churn.
This is something worse. It’s something structural and it needs a catchy name.
I propose: Human Gunk.
Gunk is what happens when content isn’t made to inform, entertain, or create meaning, but only to be seen. It’s the accumulated, suffocating residue of media optimised for machine visibility instead of human readability. Like the filth of the Augean Stables, it has built up all across the internet over the years of the last decade or so—layer upon layer of clickbait, regurgitated press releases, SEO-padding, and engagement bait. It’s made by people, but produced like sludge. It’s all Gunk. Human Gunk.
Gunk isn’t AI-generated slop—though it shares similar DNA. AI slop has a liquid quality, endlessly replicable, infinitely generated. Gunk on the other hand is sticky. It has lingered, and built up over time, even before we get to an AI Slopocalypse, the Internet is already clogged, choking the flow of actual information and meaning.
Gunk is all the awkward, keyword-stuffed sentences at the top and in the middle of every article. The personal sob stories about someone’s grandma you have to scroll past before you get to a recipe. It’s all the endless think pieces that say nothing but mention product names. It’s all the LinkedIn posts that read like they were ghostwritten by a sentient press release. It’s corporate blog spam that exists only to trap search traffic. The same five insights repackaged in a thousand different ways, all slightly worse than the last.
Everywhere you turn, Human Gunk is present. Headlines that say nothing. Listicles that recycle the same bullet points as two months ago. It’s blogposts that say ‘Everything we know’ about a product or a game that’s not eve been announced yet. That TV show that did this ‘one perfect thing’. Search results have been filed with SEO assisted posts, written not for people but for Google’s algorithm. For years.
The newspapers protesting for stronger copyright protections against AI this week are in my opinion some of the worst offenders. Churnalism is entirely about the production of gunk. I mean, The Daily Mail’s website is more gunky than the floor of a rave at 5am.
If media organisations *actually* cared about the integrity and value of their copyrighted content, they would show a little pride in it. They’d stop writing engagement-bait headlines, stop flooding their websites with machine-readable fluff, and stop participating in the very race to the bottom that made ai training so easy in the first place. But of course, they won’t. Because Gunk isn’t an accident—it’s the natural outcome of a system where attention and advertising dollars have become the only currency that matters.
The Slopocalypse is fear that AI-generated slop flooding the web—and I understand, I’ve had AI content generated about me. But let’s be honest, the web has already been sticky with Gunk for years. AI has just made this crystal clear. If you find it hard to distinguish something written by AI or a human, don’t worry, I can’t either. Humans spent the last decade writing like machines.
Under the pressure of platform physics, the shape of our media has changed:
The physics of Google rewards clickbait.
The physics of Facebook prioritises minion memes.
The physics of YouTube forces creators into soy face thumbnails and trend-chasing.
And so the cycle continues. The internet gets gunkier and AI gets trained on all that Gunk and then produces more of it.
The question is: how do we resist?
I for one have started refusing to engage with zero-information headlines. I won’t get baited into a click. It’s made my whole experience of the internet more mindful, and I consume far less gunk as a result. I’ve also try (wherever possible) to make creative work for real people, not machines. No algorithm-chasing. No engagement traps. No optimised thumbnails.
This doesn’t mean I ignore discoverability completely. If I really cared about it, my blog would be on Substack. I try really hard to resist the pressure of platforms, dictatating the structure and style of the things I make. I try to make atemporal work that lasts
The internet is already full of content optimised to be seen, but not necessarily read by humans. I don’t see any point in playing a game that gets more people in the door only to have them arrive and find it’s the same as everything else.
At the end of the day, Human Gunk already won. It reshaped the way we write, the way we consume, the way we think about information. AI **might** make everything worse—but in my opinion, the worst has already happened.
We’re already knee deep in The Augean Stables. But the act of cleaning out the stables isn’t just about shovelling slop and cleaning gunk. It’s about making room for something better.
The only way out is through. Not refusal, but creation. Write with care. Make things that matter. People over platforms. Audience over algorithm.
If we want an internet worth having, we have to fill it with things worth making.
Otherwise, all we have left is Slop and Gunk.
Newsletter 📨
Subscribe to the mailing list and get my weeknotes and latest podcast episodes, sent directly to your inbox
Leave a Reply