The Enduring Allure of Real Life

Slop, soul, and the new creative tension

Last spring, I wrote a piece about embracing AI without losing our creativity. I prefaced the piece by admitting I felt unqualified to write it: 14 months ago, AI’s promises and precautions were merely forecasts. I was offering predictions, not first-hand insights.

It’s stunning how quickly what felt like fringe possibilities have become reality.

• AI leading to more iteration and less innovation? Beth Bentley sees it. Christopher does, too.

• AI turning creatives into content engines, and content creators into AI avatars? It’s happening.

• AI designing strategy? We're there.

• AI-generated images and headlines that bear an uncanny resemblance to reality, but leave us anxious, uncertain, and generally untrusting of the world? There’s a name for this: slop.

This isn’t a glitch in the matrix. Mainstream culture is the matrix.

As I warned last year:

“We’re frighteningly close to becoming a culture that has lost its ability to think critically and create things of quality, because we are rewarded for speed of our productivity. And because human output can hardly keep pace with culture, much less technology, we will be forced to rely on AI more and more to keep up with production demands. Content will be the easiest way to spot this crisis of quality and creativity. As LLM’s and multimodal models become more sophisticated, we will become more tolerant of fully AI-generated content. We will come to accept it as the norm in the mainstream, primarily because…the quantity of content we produce, and the speed at which we do it, will be rewarded by the algorithms, and there will be no way to sustain this output without technological support.”

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that in July 2025, we’re there.

Here’s why I’m not worried.

The Current Chasm

I remember years ago when we were excited about "phygital" strategies. This was the era of integrating a brand into physical and digital environments for a seamless experience. Today we call this a “brand universe” and it's table stakes.

But just like before, this moment asks us to break binary thinking and embrace duality as a strategy. This is not a time for either/or thinking. It’s a time for deep thinking and strategic integration, identifying where AI belongs, and where humans reign.

The slop we see today is a predictable part of AI’s coming-of-age story. Like all innovation, AI is tracking the Technology Adoption Lifecycle curve.

Where we are on this tidy bell curve is in the Chasm, a messy phase that lives between the Early-Adopter / Early Majority Zone.

Early adopters litter the landscape with half-baked experiments. Technologists rack up spectacular failures as they stress-test new tools in public. Cultural hype peaks, then plummets as the early majority enters the chat, demanding more and tolerating less. All of this forces us to scrutinize reality, decide what to embrace, and figure out how to make it work.

The creative chaos of the Chasm is necessary for longterm success. From this place of disillusionment, norms will emerge. We get to define “responsible AI”, “ethical tech”, and where it all fits within our process.

Sure, fear-mongering abounds. But, I see the pendulum starting to swing.

The New Creative Tension

When the sharpest minds are obsessing over how to spot AI-generated “slop,” how to reclaim control over our digital liveness, how to revitalize the experience economy, and how to intentionally create friction that consumers crave, I feel assured. The real culture creators and taste makers will never stand for a world full of slop.

The creative class has always been ruled by a countercultural spirit, aesthetic discernment, and a knack for filling the void with beauty and soul.

Look beneath the slop, and you’ll find a social stratum made up of cultural creatives seeking the savory, the sensorial, the raw, the real, the textural, the tangible, the analog, the unexpected.

“We’ve binged too hard on everything artificial, algorithmic etc. We’re craving real, tangible things with perspective, craftsmanship, quality, stories…make us feel something.”

Jess Egger in an interview on Thinking Out Loud

They are the ones refusing to let algorithms dictate their rhythms. They aren’t chasing vanity metrics or trying to game the system. They aren’t playing by the system’s rules. And this is why they are always one step ahead.

They are the ones quietly quitting hyper-consumerist culture and embracing craft instead.

They are seeking wisdom more than knowledge.

They are inviting complexity, contradiction, interpretation, and the nuance of truth into their lives.

The new creative tension is not digital vs. physical, or AI vs. real life. It’s about choosing the right output and experience from both worlds. How we balance this tension will be the signature of our craft.

As we ride this latest wave of innovation, it’s worth remembering why we create in the first place: to add richness and meaning to our lives.

Real life, with its textures, styles, instincts, imperfections, and unpredictable, unrepeatable moments, remains our greatest canvas.