SPEAKER_01 0:34

It can take years to find your writing voice. And if you're a writer, you know what mentors have said to you. You need to find your voice. What does that even mean? Where did it go that you have to find it? Is it hiding under the sofa? But over time, you do find it. You recognize how you explain things, the phrases you use, the odd comparisons you make, what you believe, and what you refuse to say just because everybody else says it and that's not what you say. Then you hand the hard-earned voice to AI and say, Can you polish this? And AI can come back with a bucket of hand sanitizer and bleach, scrub every little quirk out of your content, and hand you something that is perfectly polished, but it doesn't sound like you. And that's what we're going to talk about today: what AI Slop is, why it happens, and how to use AI without having it eliminate your voice that you work so hard to develop. Stay tuned.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

Let's amplify your authority.

SPEAKER_01 1:59

Welcome everyone to the Amplify Your Authority Podcast. I'm your host, Marissa Shadrick, and I am so glad you are here. Today we're going to talk about a hot topic that maybe is hot, but it's actually an old topic that has resurfaced, and that is AI Slop. LinkedIn now gives people an option to report a post or a comment with a drop down that says seems like AI slop. Well, that got everybody nervous. They're wondering now if I use ChatGPT, does it make my content slop? What does slop mean? Could somebody actually tell that I used AI to help me with this post and then report me just because they don't think it's me or authentic? There's all these questions going on. No, AI-assisted content and AI slop are not the same thing. And honestly, the word itself sounds terrible. Slop. It sounds like something you throw into a trough to feed a bunch of pigs, doesn't it? Slop. It just sounds terrible. We certainly don't view our audience as a bunch of pigs in a pig pen. It is an insulting word. And that is partly why it caught on, I suppose. And that's probably why I'm creating this podcast around it, because I like to give pushback to stuff that I hear online. So let's talk about what AI slop is. A simple definition: it's low quality digital content that's created with very little human thought. And we've had this for a while. It can be text, images, video, automated comments, articles, heck, even webinars. You've been on those, haven't you? I've been on those where you get on and you're going, do they teach anything? Or was this just a promotion of some sort and regurgitated content that you've heard a million times? It's anything made quickly and dumped online because somebody wants more clicks, more traffic, or simply more content. But AI-assisted work doesn't automatically create slop. And this is what needs to be clarified. Okay, so let's take it one step at a time. Slop existed before AI. Let's be honest. We had plenty of slop before AI. We had boring articles written for search engines. We had canned social posts. In fact, there were tools that help people copy other people's social posts, right? If they were trending. We had overuse templates. Remember templates back in the day? Everybody would use templates and literally copy somebody's template and regurgitate it on their own post or blog or whatever it might be. We had recycled trends on YouTube. We had people copying people's titles for videos. I mean, constantly, clickbait headlines and comments. AI did not invent the slop. However, it gave it a faster production line because now with AI, more of what we used to have can be generated with AI. So what I'm trying to say is we had slot before AI. There's simply more of it now because AI makes volume cheap and easy. We can produce it much faster. But are really people at fault? I mean, why does AI slot happen? Now, maybe some people are just careless and they don't care, but I believe in people. And I think most people are not waking up in the morning saying, I think I will pollute the internet today. They are rushed. They are overwhelmed, especially solo business owners. They are trying to run a business, wear all the hats, keep feeding this content machine. And especially when algorithms keep changing, they're trying to switch things up. They're trying to figure out what works, right? They're trying to manage ad costs. If they're paying for ads, they're trying to find the content that's going to get that click or get people on their email list. And they don't have a lot of time to do this, and they don't have the support or the team to do this. There's always another post, another email, article, video, a caption, a newsletter that supposedly needs to go out. AI gives you a polished answer in seconds. Oh, we've been mesmerized by watching it work on our behalf. And poof, there it is, the answer. And when you're tired, that polished work can look pretty good. I have to admit myself, you know, sometimes I go, is this good enough? But I have to say, no, no, no, I'm not going to go to the dark side. I'm going to look at this and make sure it is something worthy of being published. So here's the takeaway for you. Polished is not the same as personal. If you give AI only a topic, it has to fill out everything else. It has to figure out the premise, the opinion, the examples, the tone, the conclusion, all of it. It doesn't have your lived experience unless you bring it into the conversation. That is how we end up with content that is technically okay, but could belong to somebody else, right? Because AI is just going through the internet and finding things and pulling it and delivering it to you in seconds. So there's a lot of pressure. The demand for constant content can cause people to hand over too much of their creative process. Speed starts to matter more than thought. There's a pressure. Visibility starts to matter more than value. The pressure continues. And suddenly we are publishing because the calendar says Tuesday, not because we have something meaningful to say. Now I have to admit, there are times that I go dark. I'm not publishing things as consistently, and everybody knows the rule. Consistency, consistency, that is the rule. That is what we do. But sometimes if I know I'm going to produce stuff that is, since this is a family-friendly podcast, I will say low quality, but I had another word in mind. But if I was to produce something that's low quality, I'm not going to do it. I'm not, I'm not that important. Nothing is going to break, nothing is going to fall apart if I don't post for a week, two weeks, four weeks. Nothing's going to happen and things just pick up right when you start posting again. So this pressure is pressure that we allow all of these platforms to put upon us. So don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing people that are consistent. My applause to you if you're consistent. Sometimes I just can't be consistent. Between client work and other things, when it's just me as a solo business owner, it's hard. And if you manage to do that, you are my hero. What is your secret? But don't let this consistency get you sick or make you work until midnight or create this pressure that you have to produce to the point that it begins to lower the value of the content, or you compromise what you work so hard to build. And that is your brand. Your brand is so important. So for writers, coaches, consultants, and anyone building authority, there is another cost. Not only are you losing the brand, but you're losing your voice as an entrepreneur. And your voice matters so much because it's part of your brand. So don't let AI sanitize your content. So what do I mean by this? Okay, we all know what hand sanitizers are. Takes off all the germs, leaves everything squeaky clean. AI is trained to smooth things out, right? It's trained to do that. It fixes strange sentences, it softens the strong opinions, it removes slang, which drives me crazy because I use a lot of slang when I talk. That's just the way I am. I was born in New York and raised in LA. There's gonna be a lot of slang because I'm a city girl, even though I live in Tennessee, love Tennessee. I wish I had the accent, but I'm a dead giveaway. I'm a city girl. AI may treat your quirks like mistakes, and they're not. Those quirks are what make people recognize you. It can take something that you've written and remove all your fingerprints off of it until it's so polished that there are no fingerprints left. Nothing left, no sign of you at all. The content is too squeaky clean, it's too generic.

unknown 10:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 10:36

It may be correct, but the person writing it disappeared. The writing voice includes you. It is the rhythm of your sentences, it's the words you naturally use, or the words you would never use. It's your humor, your slang, your frustrations, your tenderness, your convictions. The comparisons that make a perfect sense to you and make somebody else say, I never thought of it that way. And they probably didn't because you're that quirky to think of it that way. But that's a good thing. We need quirky people. We need people with a different point of view. We need people that express things differently so that we can understand content that we're trying to understand. You need to add the stories and the observations you earned by living and working, not by prompting. And I've lived a long time. I'm not a spring chicken, so I got lots of stories, observations, experience that I can share. And maybe that will help someone that is a peer, or maybe it'll help someone that is younger than me, so they don't make the same mistakes. And this is what really creates interesting content. So, how do we prevent AI slop when we're right there inside the tool, Chat GBT, Gemini, Claude? Two words. Push back. Those are two words that I've said for a long time inside my AI lab for solopreneurs. Give AI push back and begin to not argue necessarily, but question, why did you do that? Why did you take that out? Why did you remove what I put in that paragraph? And sometimes what I do is I let it know that I do not want this to sound like everybody else. I don't want heavy editing. I want to use this story just the way I'm recording it and you're receiving it as it transcribes my voice using the microphone. I go, don't leave those things out. I want you to include them because that's me explaining something. So I give it pushback and we'll go through revisions until my voice is back in it. Now, AI will continue to learn, and if you give it good knowledge, it will understand what it needs to do, but it needs to be reminded because it tries to always be super helpful to the point where it wants to make you invisible. And so you need to give it pushback. The goal is not to make your writing polish, the goal is to improve your communication without removing the communicator. So sometimes we have a whole lot of ideas and we're recording and it's a mishmash of stuff. For example, to create this podcast, I used AI to help me create the recording notes. And I just went on a rant. I just recorded and I said that the podcast was going to be about AI slop. I don't even like the term slop because it reminds me of a bunch of pigs, and we're not writing to pigs, and I went on a rant. Some of it I could not publish when I go on a rant, but AI is very forgiving, has a lot of grace with me. And I let it know what I actually think. So I go on a rant and I let it know my opinions, and then I have it maybe search like where did this come from? And that's when I realized, you know, it started a while ago, way before LinkedIn did what they did this year, because I knew the term was public a year ago, because I think I even published something in a podcast about it, about AI slot, but it just kind of took off, right? So I was explaining this, and I explained my years of writing and going to writing conferences and everybody telling me about discover your voice, develop your writing voice, your writing voice, and everybody coveted the writing voice. What is a writing voice? How do you find your writing voice? I explained all this to AI, right? I didn't have it go search AI slot for a podcast, right? And then I said, you know, I don't like being removed. I feel like somebody bleached my whole conversation, took me out, and left, you know, some other person there. And it feels like oversanitizing or bleaching. I don't know, maybe that's not the right way to explain it, but that's what it feels like. Because, you know, bleach makes things white and sanitizers take all the germs away. Maybe it's not the best comparison, but it's my comparison, right? And then I explained to them, you know, I want them to understand that I'm not criticizing them. I understand the pressure because there's always pressure. Create more, more, more, more. Sometimes less is more. And these solopreneurs wear many, many hats. I continued my rant. And this was to prepare the recording notes for this podcast. And I said, don't sanitize my voice. Keep my quirky humor, if there is humor there, keep my slang, my odd comparisons, and some of my opinions too. But I never want to be offensive. So I'll make sure I'm not like too over the top. And I say all this to AI as I'm talking about AI Slop, and I give it some actual data research that I found, and I have it help me create the recording notes. So, what it does is it helps you express your thinking. All that rant, it helps you express it a little better so it makes sense and you don't sound like a crazy person on a rant, right? Because if I published what I recorded in AI, you'd probably would not listen to another episode of Amplify Your Authority. So the more of yourself you put into the process, the less AI has to fill all those empty spaces with generic language. And that's the difference. AI scales what is already there. So if you give it a blank page, it's gonna fill the page with average blah. Give it your thinking, give it your rant, and it has something to work with and it'll help you express it a little better. So if you want to audit the finished product of something you're gonna publish or record, you can do the do I still hear me check. And one of the things you can do is you can read it out loud. Does it sound like something you would say? Your ear will catch what your eye misses when you're reading it. Would you actually say this to someone, or would you explain this in this way? Is there a real opinion here? Or is it just a collection of research sentences? Did you include an observation or an experience or something that you believe? Could the exact post that you're about to publish appear under 10 other people's names? Right. That happened to me one time. I had a topic that I wanted to find an angle for it, and it gave me suggestions. And I said, Oh, these are great suggestions. Let's go with this suggestion, and it helped me with it. And then I read that angle on somebody else's post. And I went, coincidence, maybe, maybe not. And I realized, hmm, are you telling everybody the same thing, AI? Are you giving everybody the same insights here? So that's when I realized I needed to scrutinize some of the things it was producing. You always got to fact check for sure, but you also got to ask it, where'd you get that idea from? Was that published somewhere else? Again, what are the two magic words? Push back. Push back. You don't have to fear AI because I don't want you to think like, oh, I don't want to use it because I don't want people to think I'm producing AI slop. No, no, no, no. Don't let any of this stop you from using AI or be afraid to use AI. Use it for brainstorming, for organizing, for research. Oh, it's so good for research, for revisions, for putting into words what you're feeling and to repurpose things and find gaps in your thinking. Like, what did you leave out? And to express things. Like I just did a post at the time of this recording. I found out that our beloved Dolly Parton had passed away. And I was, it just threw me. It I stopped what I was doing when I heard the news. And I I had to create a post on LinkedIn, but I I was actually heartbroken and I didn't know what to say to honor someone who was not only iconic for her music and her skills and talent, but for a human being. And I went on a rant about Dolly Parton and I shared everything because I live in Tennessee. One of the first things I wanted to do is go to Dollywood. And I went on a rant and I said, I'm feeling I'm feeling actually emotional, which is strange because this is a celebrity, yet I just love Dolly Parton so much. And I I want to make sure that this rant that I'm going through right now, that it's somehow it could be read and make sense. And I had AI help me express what I recorded with ChatGBT. And it was still my voice, it was still what I was sharing, but it helped me articulate what I was trying to articulate from my heart. But I felt sadness and it was hard to do. And AI can help you with that. And that is not slop. It is not slop. So that's just one example. I don't usually get emotional when I'm writing posts, but this one was, you know, a situation that I can use as example here because I couldn't think clearly for a second. It really kind of knocked me for a loop, you know, because I've always loved Dolly Parton, loved her music, loved her as a human. And I just wanted to make sure I didn't say something weird on LinkedIn. So anyway, the post is there. I think it turned out fine. But you can see an example if you want, go look at it. I don't think it sounds like AI Slop. I think it sounds like me. But, you know, if somebody says it is, well, I'll just say, you know, all of those thoughts, feelings are mine. So if AI helped me articulate it and you think that's AI slop, well, you know, that's up to you. If you want to push that little button on LinkedIn and say this is AI slop, and that's the thing. We had no control with what people do, but we can control what we do, right? And we can, with best intentions, use AI ethically. So you don't have to fear AI because average content is becoming easier to produce and recognize. So your content will become more valuable, not less, when you put in your perspective, when you stay true to your brand. AI can help you still create a draft. You decide whether the draft deserves your name or not. So you can work with AI, and what they're really cracking down on are all those automations and things, the massive amount of content that's being produced that's just generic junk and doesn't really say anything. Most of my listeners, even though I don't know you personally, if you're listening to this, I feel like you've got values, you have passion for what you're doing. You're going to share from your heart. For many of my followers, it's not just the money, it's the purpose that it fills and what they want to do. I'll just blanketly say you're okay. Don't worry. So as I close here, this podcast episode, Slop is not new. It's been around forever. The internet has had low quality content way before open AI. What change is the speed and the scale of it? And the answer is not to avoid AI or to become afraid of AI. The answer is to value your voice, your brand, your authenticity enough to notice when AI has scrubbed it away and then put it back in. Quirks in all, we love your quirks. We love your personality. You share your personality, who you really are. People will love it. I promise they will. So use AI, let it make your work easier and stronger, especially when you're trying to share something from the heart and you don't know exactly how to articulate it. It can help you with that. I hope this clears up a little bit about AI slop and it puts your mind at ease. And you don't have to worry about the AI police. I wouldn't. I don't. So just take one AI-assisted draft and read it out loud, take a look at it, figure out with that little checklist I gave you. You know, do I share an opinion? Take a look at it and see if this is something you would say. And then uh you could just maybe print it out and circle or highlight areas that don't belong there, and then explain it to AI. Just say, we're gonna do a redo on this. And I don't want you to remove some of the things that I'm pretty passionate about, and then replace at least one of those sentences or observation, opinion, example, and explain it to AI using the microphone in just your natural voice. Nobody's hearing you. So you can rant is perfectly okay. Nobody's hearing you. And then see what you can produce and see if you like it better. Because I want you to be proud about what you produce. And that goes along with video and that goes with audio and text and even images. Even images can have AI slop. And we're getting to the point where the tools are getting so sophisticated now that we can begin to really customize our images based on our brand. I don't know if we were able to do that without a lot of cost before, but now it's possible to do it, especially now that many of these tools have skills. We can create skills that are aligned with our brand as well. So even our images can improve. Because I'll tell you, there's a lot of images that all look alike right now, at least on LinkedIn, because that's where I'm at most of the time. We want to make sure our brand comes through. So with that, I hope you found this podcast episode helpful. And if you did, please leave a five star review. I would love it. It would help me get the word out. And of course, as always, until next time, take care and I'll talk to you soon.