Which is worse: AI slop or moronic slop?

For the next five years, I don’t think the interesting question will be:

“Was this written by AI?”

The more interesting question will be:

“How did you manage to preserve your stupidity when intelligence became this accessible?”

Humans were producing slop long before LLMs existed.
Bad arguments. Gossip. Conspiracies. False accusations. Empty confidence. Recycled opinions. People repeating things they barely understood because knowing a few facts gave them status over someone else.

AI didn’t invent any of that.

What AI changes is the excuse.
For centuries, people could hide mediocre thinking behind scarcity:
“I know something you don’t.”
“I read the book.”
“I know the terminology.”
“I have access to the information.”
That advantage is collapsing.
When almost everyone can retrieve information, compare sources, translate concepts and explore unfamiliar fields instantly, merely possessing information stops being impressive.

Then we finally get to the uncomfortable part:
What can you actually do with it?

Can you connect ideas that were previously separate?
Can you notice contradictions?
Can you tell signal from noise?
Can you create a better question instead of repeating an old answer?

That’s why I find the obsession with “AI slop” funny.
Yes, AI can generate garbage at enormous scale.

But humanity has been generating moron slop at enormous scale for thousands of years, and much of it came with titles, institutions, confidence and social status attached.

The next hierarchy probably won’t be human vs AI.

It will be people who learned how to think with powerful tools versus people whose entire sense of intellectual superiority depended on everyone else having worse access to information.
So maybe the next five-year question isn’t:

“How do we identify AI slop?”

Maybe it’s:

“When intelligence became cheap, how did you manage to keep your stupidity expensive?”