Slop gets a standing ovation

AI hysteria is real. The deeper AI gets embedded into corporate life, the more often I notice work that’s objectively worse get a standing ovation - just because it was made with AI. I’ve seen it happen to my wife’s team and I’ve caught it in myself too.

My wife is in the design industry. Her team does the high-end, handcrafted work: executive decks, go-to-market materials, the reports that end up in front of leadership. They polish the storyline together with the presenter, argue over accents, make sure the right story gets told the right way.

Then AI adoption got ahead, and people stopped coming to them. Why book a designer when you can generate a deck yourself?

Here’s what I don’t understand. The generated decks are multiple levels worse compared to the handcrafted designer-made ones, yet everyone is happy with them. A PowerPoint you never laid a finger on feels impressive by definition.

Why? Because all executives in the world right now are under pressure to show AI adoption and use-cases by their teams. And this shapes the incentives.

The claim “this was generated end-to-end with AI agent” is much stronger in 2026 than “the custom brand images were generated"…

Sometimes it looks like a madhouse to me. One person generates something with AI and decides it’s good enough (it’s not). The reviewer looks at it and goes “this is great” about the work below what they’d normally accept from a human.

This is the thing I don’t like about AI the most:

I notice the same pull in myself.

Instead of spending time on a proper handcrafted takeaway, I sometimes prefer firing a prompt at my set of AI skills and letting them generate the thing for me.

I don’t think it’s the right approach. So I started being more deliberate about where I actually want AI in my work – and where I want to stay creative and own the content fully myself.

When I consistently prompt agents to do even the slightest changes, I feel I become a manager without hands – I’m able to give orders, unable to touch/own the work.

Like that guy from WALL-E who sits in a chair all day talking to his computer and can’t do a thing with his hands.

I don’t want that.

Here’s what I actually believe: it would change in a year from now - when the adoption wave settles more and “made with AI” stops being impressive.

Once AI output is the new norm, nobody will approve slop for how it was made. And from the design standpoint people would get fed-up with generic similar looking visuals too (I hope).

The bar climbs back up. And people of craft who kept thinking (who kept their taste and their hands) will be the ones getting the real value out of these tools.

Brim (the water reminder iOS app) got its own website. I’m super keen to experiment with some SEO ideas over the next months and see if we can get mentioned by LLMs :)

What’s the one piece of work you refuse to hand over to AI?

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