“When I use AI, everything either sounds robotic or boring. Or it’s way overstuffed with words.”

Sound familiar? 

AI is an amazing helper when it comes to content creation. Maybe you don’t have enough information about a subject. Or perhaps you’re trying to figure out how to outline or plan an article. 

Automation tools can help you create amazing content. 

But AI can’t do the job for you. 

And that’s where you’ll run into major problems.

If you let robots do it all, you’ll likely end up with content that’s shallow at best, or cringey at worst. No one really wants to read what a robot has to say, not even your internal team.

If you send a message that’s obviously AI-generated, your customers might ignore it. If your blog is full of repetitive content that some AI churned out, your readers can lose interest. And if your internal company messaging is entirely automated, your employees won’t even read it.

On its own, will usually give you the equivalent of slop.

But here’s the good news: you can fix this problem fast with just a few style tweaks. 

In this post, we’re going to teach you how to spot the slop… and how to clean it up.

Let’s dive in.

What Does AI Slop Look Like? 

AI slop [ā‑ī släp] noun - extraneous, over-generated, and often low‑quality content generated by an AI system that looks like filler.

It’s the nonsensical, hallucinatory, or low-effort content pushed out by artificial intelligence that really only knows how to regurgitate something that’s already been said. It offers nothing new.

We use the word slop to describe it because, for great content creators, that’s what AI-only content looks like. It’s messy, it’s ugly, and it lacks real substance. 

Here are just three examples of classic AI slop: 

The AI-generated junk email 

Eww. It’s got a generic subject line you’ve seen a million times. Your name is clearly generalized. The language is… dorky. 

The obviously AI-generated comments: 

Okay, come on. When you see comment after comment with the same exact tone and language, you know you’re dealing with a bot army. 

The unnecessarily long AI-generated explanation: 

Nobody needs that many words to describe a product or service. This is sales marketing. Not Freshman Philosophy 101. 

Why Paraphrasing Doesn’t Help

When you ask AI to create content for you, it’s like a kid doing its best to summarize what it finds on the internet. It will summarize, give you lots of smart-sounding words, and make everything look nice. 

Even if you know it sounds like slop, you try to clean it up. 

How? 

You paraphrase everything AI says. 

Here’s an example: 

AI: “We beseech you to reassess your course of action!” 

Your paraphrase: “We beg you to reconsider your decision.” 

Text like this reads like it was run through a thesaurus. It’s not natural. It’s not human-sounding. Your customers know it. And if you really think about it, you know it, too. 

AI Slop is Hurting Your Content Strategy

So, you want to know, what’s the big deal? It gets the point across. Does it really matter if you just send out the mediocre, AI-generated content? 

Yes. It matters. 

When you ask AI to create content for you, it’s like a kid doing its best to summarize what it finds on the internet. It will summarize, give you lots of smart-sounding words, and make everything look nice. 

And you might see it and think, “good enough.” 

But when your readers see it, it doesn’t resonate, and it will likely hurt your chances of engaging the customer.

That’s because AI is not human, and readers know it. It’s easy to tell.

So, yes. By all means, use AI. Use it to generate ideas. Use it to fill in areas of information you don’t have. You can even use some specific reference text.

But type up your content yourself, manually. That way, your personality will come through naturally. 

If you create content manually, you won’t need to TRY to sound like a human because, surprise, surprise, you ARE a human. 

Humans are getting better at detecting AI. The more experience we all have with working with AI and differentiating between machine and human-generated text, the better we get at picking up on even the most subtle differences. Forbes recently reported that many humans are now able to detect AI-written content with 99.3% accuracy. 

Your audience wants human-written content, and they’re getting more savvy at telling the difference. 

Here’s how you can keep your content from looking like slop: 

1. Cut the Fluff

Yes. AI loves fluff. It will give you 20 words for what you can say in 5. 

Example: 

AI: “In today’s fast-paced digital era, businesses must leverage innovative solutions…”

Human: “Let’s be real. You need better tools to close deals faster.” 

Now, which one do you think real people want to read? Which do you think they actually understand? 

More importantly, which one do you think they’ll respond to? 

You’re talking to lay people out there. Most of your customers want common-sense solutions to their real problems in business. Just show up and provide them. 

The takeaway? Cut the fluff.

1. Keep your content short and substantive. 
2. Make it easy to scan quickly, so your reader can decide if they want to engage fully.

2. Make Your First Line Punch

Long-winded, academic… boring… we’re falling asleep before we ever get to your point. And it might even be a great point. But it’s too far down in the introduction for your reader to get to it before they zone out. 

Hook your reader, every time, with a first line that punches. 

Example: 

AI:  “Sales enablement is an important strategy that helps teams…”

Human: “Your reps aren’t using your decks. Here’s how to fix that.”

Bam! You made your point. They got it. Now they’re sitting up and paying attention. Every word you write should matter. 

Of course, your first line will depend on your field. 

• If you’re a marketer writing a blog post…. make your point up top. Don’t bury the lede. 
• If you’re in sales and you’re pitching a prospect, focus on the pain point immediately. Avoid the long-winded intros common with AI-generated text.

And if you can’t think of a pain point, something that really punches, just remember what it is you’re trying to sell. What problem are you solving? Present that information up front. 

The takeaway? Hook ’em fast and don’t bore readers with long preambles. 

3. Format Like a Human

There was a time when writing walls of text was considered a good thing. In the early 1900s, the Wall Street Journal was one of the most popular news publications, and the elite intellectuals would sit with their newspapers and read the giant blobs of text in tiny font. 

No fancy images, no bullet points, no one-liners. 

Just big, long paragraphs with big, long sentences. 

Here’s what an AI email might look like:

Sales enablement tools matter because they give sales teams the resources, insights, and automation they need to close deals more effectively. In today’s competitive landscape, reps can’t rely on instinct or outdated materials—they need up-to-date content, real-time data, and streamlined workflows to meet buyers where they are. Sales enablement platforms centralize training, track engagement, and ensure reps have access to the right messaging at the right time, which directly improves productivity, consistency, and win rates across the team 🚀

It’s too clean. Too perfect. It’s got an em dash. Something about that rocket ship emoji placement just looks… artificial.

Here’s what a more human email looks like:

Hey Bob, your team is likely struggling with onboarding new reps. Our tell makes the onboarding process fully automated. Here’s how: 

• We centralize training. You track engageement.
• Your reps get their messaging right on day 1.
• Your whole team gets better win rates. 

Interested?

It’s got spelling errors. It’s easy to skim. It has incomplete sentences 😮

It looks like something a person wrote.

Big difference, right? 

Break it down, break it up, but be careful. 

Gotcha: AI will try to mimic this structure, too. It will give you tons of bullets and numbered lists. So remember that not everything needs a quick summary. You can just break sentences into more concise points and make your paragraphs shorter, like this one. 

The takeaway? Make your reader feel like there’s a RHYTHM to your imperfect text.

4. Eliminate the Overused AI Words

Remember we said that AI is like a kid trying to sound smart? Yea. It uses a lot of big-sounding words to make your content seem super smart. 

After all, AI systems have been trained on millions of pages of corpo-speak. So they’re going to use that jargon heavily. 

Your customers don’t want to hear that. 

Here’s how AI might talk: “Leverage, optimize, empower, cutting-edge…”

Here are alternative words that sound more human: “Use, fix, help, better.”

The takeaway? Do convert your corpo-speak to human works. If it sounds like LinkedIn soup, delete it. You can do better. 

5. Add a Human POV

You want to sound more human? Be human. Talk to your customer using “I,” “we,” and “you.” You’re having a conversation with your customer, not writing a manual on knowledge automation. 

Show them you’re not an AI.

The more you humanize yourself and your customer, the more engaged you can expect them to be. 

LLMs tend to only speak in the first person if you directly ask them a question. 

Examples: 

How AI will write it: “AI can improve sales productivity.”

How a human might phrase it: “We’ve seen teams cut time-to-pitch in half using AI-powered enablement.”

AI: In an era of generative AI and content automation, it’s tempting to let algorithms take the reins on blog writing. 

Human: You’ve got to stop letting AI and automation write your blogs for you. 

AI: In competitive industries, thought leadership and differentiated viewpoints are what elevate content from generic to impactful.

Human: Your perspective, your leadership, and your viewpoints elevate your content and make an impact on your audience. 

The bottom line: 

Your customers want to hear from you, about you, and how you’ll help them, or how you’ve helped others. 

See how personal that is? 

Keep it that way. 

6. Add Visuals

Visuals are critical to content today. People don’t want a wall of text, and AI will deliver a wall of text unless you tell it otherwise. 

So break up your sections with graphs, charts, and other visual elements that make your point. 

You can even include memes, like we do here. 

People want to laugh. 

Especially when you include fun and funny visuals, you remind your readers that you’re human. 

You remind them that they’re human. And you connect. 

AI is Your Assistant, Not Your Replacement

In the end, we want you to use AI. We love AI and automation for how helpful they can be. But it can never, and should never, replace humans. Humans are emotional, empathetic, compassionate, and… well… human. 

So stay human, and you’ll get more humans to respond to you. 

How can you stay human? Use AI to help you generate ideas, to teach you what you don’t know, and to point you in the right direction. 

Then create content manually, from your perspective and point of view. 

Cut the slop.  

FAQs