November 6, 2025
Welcome to the Slop Era
The trust collapse: Infinite AI content is awful
AI slop is everywhere: readers blacklist brands and beg for real humans
TLDR: A marketer says infinite AI-made content is flooding feeds and wrecking trust, so buyers ignore outreach unless it’s clearly human. Commenters split between boycotts of “AI slop,” accelerationists who say build anyway, and calls to rebuild trusted institutions—plus snark that VC money keeps zombie startups alive.
Author Arnon Shimoni says the cost of making content just crashed to zero—and so did trust. The crowd nodded hard, then lit the comments on fire. One top vibe: buyers are done with pitch decks and robo-emails; they want proof there’s a real person behind the message. Cue inbox fatigue: multiple readers joked their email and LinkedIn are now “auto-trash,” and applauded the shift from a sales “marketing funnel” to a trust funnel—less hype, more human.
The drama hit a high when bgwalter called out YouTube’s “AI slop” ads, citing plastic-looking “actors” and even a Freenow spot where cars roll with wheels not turning. Verdict: blacklist the brand. Others piled on with “spamageddon” memes and “everything looks fake now” jokes. But not everyone’s boycotting—everdrive went full accelerationist: keep building, consequences be damned. Meanwhile, alexpotato pulled a Yuval Harari moment, arguing we’ll beat the flood of fakes the old-fashioned way: by trusting strong institutions again.
A sharp side-thread: huijzer says “unsustainable” startups can survive for years on investor money, challenging the article’s doom on bad business models. And piker summarized the mood in one phrase: the signal-to-noise is insane. The takeaway? People aren’t asking “what’s your product,” they’re asking “why should I trust you,” and AI copy-paste won’t cut it anymore.
Key Points
- •The author asserts AI has reduced content creation costs to near zero, enabling mass generation of outreach and marketing materials.
- •A B2B SaaS sales lead example highlights that buyers increasingly ignore unknown outreach due to difficulty distinguishing real people from automated messages.
- •The article introduces a "trust funnel" as an alternative to traditional marketing funnels, prioritizing relationship-building and advocacy over conversions.
- •Key differences outlined include focus (trust vs. lead gen), endpoint (advocacy vs. purchase), content strategy (helpful vs. promotional), success metrics (satisfaction vs. conversions), and timeline (long-term vs. short-term).
- •The author reports discarding most email and LinkedIn outreach because AI-generated messages appear formulaic and insincere, diminishing lead generation effectiveness.