Sloppy Joes and the Start of Another AI Podcast (with Aleck McCathie & Kent Gustavson)
Welcome to the first episode of Man vs. Slop, where we try to explain why "man" and why "slop."
Deezer tagged 13.4 million AI tracks last year. By April the platform was taking in 75,000 a day, 44 percent of everything uploaded, and by July more than half. Almost nobody listens to any of it. A big pond nobody wants to wade into.
A Graphite study in May found that about half the articles written online are machine written, though only 7 percent of the pages ranking first on Google. LinkedIn has added a flag that reads "seems like AI slop."
Slop is older than any of this. Primordial goo, mud, junk, wasted material. The guy on the corner of the marketplace, spouting what sounded like nonsense to everybody else. Tabloids, back when there was such a thing as a newspaper. Everybody from 90 down to kids now thinks they're a genius, because they can push the red button and out comes a book on the topic of their choice.
Crazy means cracked, and the cracks are where the light comes through. Which is the opposite of what the tool does when everyone asks it to turn their thought into a post and the post comes out vanilla.
AI is turning into a utility, like electricity, like the internet. The difference is you can still unplug this one.
Chapters:
- (00:22) - What slop means
- (01:19) - Why the title says man
- (02:19) - Slop before AI: tabloids and the man on the corner
- (03:35) - From spell check to full generation
- (04:33) - Sparring with AI versus delegating to it
- (05:13) - LinkedIn's AI slop flag
- (06:55) - The Deezer numbers
- (08:30) - A thousand songs nobody listened to
- (09:26) - Crazy as in cracked
- (12:04) - Catch-22, SpaceX and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- (15:00) - The company they should start
- (15:36) - The Graphite study
- (16:42) - Making things versus posting things
- (18:09) - White text, keyword stuffing and gaming the system
- (22:16) - AI as a Swiss Army knife
- (23:07) - Nobody is an AI expert, including the experts
- (24:05) - AI rap on the radio
Referenced in this episode:
Deezer: AI music passes 50% of daily uploads - https://newsroom-deezer.com/2026/07/ai-music-exceeds-50-percent-daily-uploads-deezer/
Graphite: AI now writes as many online articles as humans - https://graphite.io/five-percent/research/ai-now-writes-as-many-online-articles-as-humans-do
Graphite: AI content in search - https://graphite.io/five-percent/research/ai-content-in-search-and-llms
LinkedIn adds a button to report AI slop - https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/30/linkedin-adds-a-button-to-report-ai-generated-slop/
404 Media: LinkedIn's "seems like AI slop" button - https://www.404media.co/linkedin-introduces-a-seems-like-ai-slop-button/
Connect with Aleck: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleck-m/
Connect with Kent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentgustavson
Man vs. Slop is a Podcasts That Matter production: https://podcaststhatmatter.org
