My brain started skipping AI slop without asking me

Before anyone reads the title and puts me in the "AI is ruining everything" camp, I use AI for hours every day. I follow this stuff obsessively, and I'm heavily invested in AI infrastructure. I have plenty of reasons to want this technology to succeed. I'm also having a lot of fun using it.

Which makes something I've noticed about myself a little funny.

My brain has started skipping AI slop. Text, images, videos. I scroll past without really looking at them, and usually without making any conscious decision to do so. Sometimes I notice it afterward. I just passed a whole post and couldn't tell you what it was about.

I never decided to start doing this. It seems to have developed on its own, and it feels very familiar.

I've been doing this with ads for years

When I browse a website, I barely register the display ads. I don't look at each banner, identify it as advertising, and politely decline to give it my attention. My eyes just go somewhere else.

Sometimes the ad hasn't even loaded yet. The page shifts a little, a gap opens up, and somehow I already know which part of the screen to ignore. The advertiser hasn't even had a chance to disappoint me yet.

Sponsored posts feel similar. I can be halfway past one before I've consciously seen the word "Sponsored." Something about the image, the opening line, or the layout seems to be enough. I couldn't always explain what gave it away. My thumb has already moved on.

And lately, I've caught myself doing exactly the same thing with a certain kind of AI content.

An emoji at the start of every section. Very tidy blocks of text. That familiar rhythm where everything sounds equally important and somehow none of it is interesting. I see the shape of the post and keep scrolling. I haven't even read the first sentence properly.

My guess is that after enough disappointing encounters, I started recognizing the packaging. Reading things that look like this usually doesn't give me much, so I stop bothering. That's how it feels from my side, anyway. I'm describing something I've noticed while scrolling, not reporting the results of a brain scan.

I can almost hear the robot reading it

The infographics are probably the clearest example for me.

I keep seeing ones generated with Gemini that look like they came out of the same template. The same font, similar layouts, little sections arranged with almost military discipline. But the wording is what really gets me.

Everything is squeezed into short labels and stiff little statements. Numbers get announced, things get sorted into categories, and a neat conclusion sits underneath. Read it in your head and there's this flat, repetitive rhythm, like a robot reading out a report one field at a time.

I know an infographic needs to be brief. But these often feel like someone removed all the words that would help me follow the thought. Each box makes sense on its own, yet I still have to work out what the person wanted me to understand. Even the conclusions sound strangely automatic, as if there was a space for one in the layout and something had to go there.

I can't imagine someone explaining a subject to me like this in real life. After a few lines, I can practically hear the synthetic voice. That's usually when I lose interest.

I used to stop and look at these graphics. Quite often, I'd spend a while trying to understand what they were actually explaining. There would be boxes and arrows and labels, but I would leave with no better understanding of the subject. Sometimes I wasn't even sure what the subject was supposed to be.

After enough of those, the next one doesn't get much of a chance. Maybe it explains something brilliantly. I'll probably never find out, because it looks like the last twenty that wasted my time.

With videos, I notice a similar reaction to familiar generated visuals and that overly smooth delivery. With articles, it's often the phrasing. A few sentences in, I get that feeling that I've read this voice a thousand times already. Different topic, same voice. My attention goes elsewhere.

I followed you because I liked how you thought

I've watched this happen to accounts I follow on X, especially people writing about investing.

For a long time, they'd post in their own language. An opinion about a company, a reaction to earnings, maybe an annoyed comment about something the market was doing. I didn't have to agree with them to enjoy reading it. There was a person there with a particular way of looking at things.

Then, at some point, they apparently discovered they could use AI to produce daily market summaries.

Now every morning there's a neatly organized report. Flags, bullet points, index movements, little summaries of everything. It all looks very productive. I have absolutely no desire to read it.

I followed that account because I wanted to know what this person thought. Now I have to get through a market newsletter to find out whether they have an opinion at all.

And on some of these accounts, the difference in response is hard to miss. The personal posts got replies and likes. The mechanical summaries sit there with barely any interaction, sometimes none. I don't have a dataset that proves why, but looking at those posts, I understand the silence. I'm scrolling past them too.

The weird part is that the account is producing more content while giving me fewer reasons to keep following it.

The filter is probably unfair

Obviously, good things can be made with AI. I use it constantly, so it would be pretty ridiculous for me to argue otherwise.

But if it feels like nine out of ten posts with a certain look are slop, I doubt my brain is going to carefully investigate number ten. It seems to take the shortcut. And yes, that means I'll miss something good occasionally.

I'm also sure I sometimes mistake human writing for AI writing. People were writing terrible marketing copy long before ChatGPT existed. We managed that all by ourselves.

The models are getting better, too. The writing feels more natural, and the generated images and videos keep improving. Still, when you work with them for hours every day, you get very familiar with their habits. Certain phrases or visual choices start to jump out at you. Sometimes I even think I recognize which model someone used.

That doesn't mean I'm always right. I can't count the AI content I didn't recognize. But my scrolling habit doesn't wait for proof. Something looks familiar, I expect very little from it, and I'm gone.

I'll stop for a messy post

What gets me to stop these days is often something much less polished.

A personal thought with a photo someone actually took. A post where someone is clearly annoyed and forgot half the commas. Someone trying to explain an idea they haven't quite figured out yet. I might be more interested because it's a little chaotic. At least I can feel that they wanted to say something.

I don't need everyone to write beautifully. I'm not a native English speaker, and I'd be in trouble if perfect grammar were the price of admission. I want to read something that sounds like the person whose account I chose to follow.

There are a hundred other posts competing for my attention while I scroll. If yours looks like a summary that cost almost nothing to generate and nobody cared enough to make their own, sorry, I've probably already passed it.

The slightly awkward post about what you actually think has a much better chance with me. Leave a missing comma in there. I'll survive.

I spend hours talking to machines every day. When I open my feed, I'm usually looking for a person.