🤢What’s worse than AI slop?

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If HumpDay feels like an albatross around your neck, I’m about to brighten your Wednesday. Yep, the Feature Story is gonna show you that AI slop was just the beginning of the idiocracy (and laziness) facing the internet. 

After the Feature, you can ease into the following sections:

• The Knowledge Base  

• Self Help (disturbing call-to-action)

• Facts & Stats (Super Bowl consumer spending)

• Get Hacking  (bonus hack for ya)

 Now, let’s get into today’s Feature Story…

AI Slop: What Could Be Worse?

Brace yourself. The quality of the World Wide Web is taking a nasty hit currently. 

Yeah, so-called AI slop is on the rise. But that’s just the tip of the idiocy iceberg. 

In case you haven’t seen the definition of AI slop…

The Guardian referred to “slop” as the advanced iteration of internet spam: low-quality text, videos, and images generated by AI.

Plenty of that crap to go around. And I know AI isn’t perfect. It’s just a useful tool that needs a human to monitor it and check its work. 

What’s happening, though? Humans are avoiding that task. It’s too easy to save time by not checking AI’s work. 

Soft times make soft people. Makes ‘em lazy too, and it’s creating human-slop or human sloppiness, I should say…

See what I mean below.

The dude overlooked the “[insert hook here]” prompt. One thing to have a typo in a social media post, but a cut-n-paste AI-generated thing like that on the main part of your LinkedIn profile?

And that guy’s pretty high up at his company. He even went to the trouble of getting that little check mark thingy to show he’s “authenticated.” 

[insert hook here] screams authentic, huh?

After seeing that, are you gonna trust him to watch the finer details of whatever business he’s in or help you with your business?

That’s not just some random piece of human sloppiness I found, either. I could gather 50 more screenshots by noon. But I’m too busy writing because I can’t let AI write…

• Claude.ai lies too much

• ChatGPT is creepy

• Perplexity is a useful research assistant but is having hiccups lately

They’re tools. Good for something — but not EVERYTHING, as you’ll see…

AI Slop in Job Listings

I saw that listing while creating a course for this freelance website. The job description looks like a human wrote it. Yet, they left the AI slop at the beginning — “Here’s an ad draft for your book.”

Human sloppiness. All they had to do was re-read the thing one little time to catch that. It’s in the first seven words!

No doubt in my mind, I could find ten similar listings on Indeed’s job board. 

Little dustings of AI slop prompts sprinkled here and there. 

And some job descriptions totally AI-written and not edited at all by a person (a person who is paid to proofread the listings, BTW).

AI Slop in Reviews

Same goes for the human who’s supposed to be editing AI-generated positive reviews. 

Too lazy to even edit fake reviews!

I noticed that the other day while looking up a company. It had pristine reviews. Nearly 100% were 5-star, which is…

Impossible for a company in that industry. I got to looking. All the reviews had the same tone and flow. Some were written by real humans but likely paid to write them. I’d say about half were AI slop. Easy to pick out. 

Not only do people naturally distrust company reviews that are overwhelmingly 5-stars — now consumers will start reading a little bit closer. For example…

New moms will wanna see if a cold-blooded bot is recommending a newborn baby car seat versus another real mom who cares if other children are safe.

Hey, I’m guilty too…

I Avoid AI Slop But Can Still Get Sloppy

I only use AI tools for outlines and sometimes making a quick list. Why? I’m arrogant, for one. I don’t think Stephen King can write better than me (false confidence is helpful - try it). 

Much less a bot programmed by a computer scientist without a lick of writing skill. 

Most of all though, I don’t trust AI. These tools started out on the wrong foot. Producing insane hallucinations. How could anyone trust them after that? 

That said, I’ve screwed up plenty in my writing. You might've noticed.

The worst screw-up I had? Probably leaving a “highlighted note” inside some sales copy that got left in the final content by another team member. Not their fault, MINE. Because I knew that was a risk, so I should’ve removed that possibility. 

I pride myself on not being sloppy. Does it drive me crazy re-reading my emails and articles multiple times and having several checklists? Yes. You might’ve noticed my mental unwellness.

But I’ll endure triple-checking madness to avoid as much AI slop and human sloppiness as possible. 

One more example of AI slop mixed with human laziness, and then a quote…

Alright, the Knowledge Base is coming up…

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Self-Help

Saw a brutal Facebook post last Saturday.

I won’t trouble you with the exact post since it would derail your morning like it did mine that day. 

The point is, if you wanna make someone take action, sometimes you have to be brutally blunt with that person.

So blunt that there’s no doubt in their mind what the awful result if they do not take a specific action.

You have to “put it down where the goats can get to it.”

Facts & Stats

Bonus: Recent ScienceSays study showed content generated by AI and revised by an employee (asked to keep changes to a minimum) had an average of 17 pages in the top search rankings per day. Content made by SEO experts and students trained in SEO had ____ pages each in the top rankings per day. Answer at end of email.

Get Hacking

A specific strategy to implement today

Is it hard to re-engage an unengaged email subscriber? Yeah, but don’t give up on win-back email campaigns. 

Dan Oshinsky (of Inbox Collective) says 2—5% is a good win-back rate. 

That number makes things seem less impossible, right? 

Plus, if you only re-engage 2%, you can optimize that re-engagement campaign to try and hit 4%, just a two-point lift, but it would double the number of re-engaged subscribers. 

That means a lot even on an email list of say 10,000. You’d ultimately win back 400 subscribers... maybe more. As long as you don’t give up on win-back emails. 

ALT Hack: Use Claude.ai to repurpose your articles into audio and video scripts. Claude is the best AI tool for writing in a conversational style (but can’t be trusted to tell the truth).

The scripts won’t be perfect but won’t require a ton of editing from you. 

I did this last week on a boring case study. It turned out really good. In the process, I found this free teleprompter too.

Thanks for reading Inbox Hacking. Please share it with your peeps - it’s sugar-free but stings a bit.

Shane McLendon - Copy Kingpin

Bonus answer from Facts & Stats section:  Content made by SEO experts and students trained in SEO had 2 pages each in the top rankings per day. AI content edited by a human had 17 pages rank in the top each day.

Bonus: Think your marketing messages are simple enough for anyone to understand? Think twice. This study found 1 outta 5 adults can’t change a lightbulb or b…

ICYMI: Should you quit using the Authority Principle?