Nearly all new technologies go through a "slop" era. You see this in the industrial revolution itself - there was nearly a 100 year gap between the introduction of low quality coke fired pig iron and the introduction of the Bessemer process. That was 100 years of low-quality, gimmicky metal.
The same thing happened with the printing press. Railroads. Tractors. Electricity. Digital music. Etc. The pattern is always there. We've had, what, 2 years so far? If you're not impressed it's because you have no perspective on how long things take.
In a way, a lot of technology IS slop. Diesel locomotives have not surpassed the power or complexity of steam trains. They are just so much cheaper to build and operate that you can run 4 of them for less than the cost of a single steam engine. The whole point of innovation is doing more with less - if you focus on the "less" part everything looks an awful lot like slop.
If anything - I would argue that we are finally exiting the "slop" era of computing. If you look at the heart of what the "AI revolution" is, it's that we have finally solved the problem of natural language processing. Computers are now starting to work the way that they were supposed to work 40 years ago!
I think about this all the time. Someday my grandchild will ask me one day why we built such advanced thinking machines but still had to use our hands to physically build their thoughts with code.
You have to know that isn't what anyone means by "Slop".
Slop is *low effort* by definition, and whatever you think of the long list of technologies you mentioned none of them were remotely low effort, never mind "Tell the AI to do it for you" levels of lazy and thoughtless.
What makes AI music slop in a way that crappy pop isn't comes down to human involvement and expression. Do you know why there are fans of B-Movies and terrible movies? Because they're still an insight into the minds of the people who made them. If AI's wrote great code, if they made work so much more efficient (for everyone, not just the person generating crap for others to deal with) then it would at least be a useful utility, but that's not how it works or can work: hallucination is inevitable and impossible to fully stop, so all outputs must be carefully checked.
It wastes energy, it wastes money, and then wastes your time or someone else's when your substandard efforts require human intervention.
The whole point of tractors, trains, and casting iron was to remove effort. Asking an AI to do your bookkeeping for you is not any more lazy than driving a car or sending a voice text.
I think generative LLMs and their usefulness is a different topic. But if we're talking about "slopware" we're talking about software applications designed to handle menial tasks.
Asking a machine to think for you is absolutely different than asking it to expend physical effort for you. If you can't see the difference than frankly this is kind of pointless.
Having a calculator add numbers for you is having a machine think for you. Your computer is doing an awful lot of creative problem solving on your behalf to serve this page to you.
It sounds like you don't see a difference between thinking and creativity?
Calculators don't think for you any more than a slide-rule or a pen and paper does. It takes values and operations that you instruct and then all it does is the part that's entirely deterministic and repetitive. My computer is an extension of the same thing, and most of those extensions don't reflect a replacement of anyone's thinking. No one was previously able to send electronic signals and reconstruct them into web pages for example, that's a new and unique capability that augments our own. "Write my blog post or my code for me" is an entirely different prospect which yes includes, but isn't limited to creativity.
Nearly all new technologies go through a "slop" era. You see this in the industrial revolution itself - there was nearly a 100 year gap between the introduction of low quality coke fired pig iron and the introduction of the Bessemer process. That was 100 years of low-quality, gimmicky metal.
The same thing happened with the printing press. Railroads. Tractors. Electricity. Digital music. Etc. The pattern is always there. We've had, what, 2 years so far? If you're not impressed it's because you have no perspective on how long things take.
In a way, a lot of technology IS slop. Diesel locomotives have not surpassed the power or complexity of steam trains. They are just so much cheaper to build and operate that you can run 4 of them for less than the cost of a single steam engine. The whole point of innovation is doing more with less - if you focus on the "less" part everything looks an awful lot like slop.
If anything - I would argue that we are finally exiting the "slop" era of computing. If you look at the heart of what the "AI revolution" is, it's that we have finally solved the problem of natural language processing. Computers are now starting to work the way that they were supposed to work 40 years ago!
I think about this all the time. Someday my grandchild will ask me one day why we built such advanced thinking machines but still had to use our hands to physically build their thoughts with code.
You have to know that isn't what anyone means by "Slop".
Slop is *low effort* by definition, and whatever you think of the long list of technologies you mentioned none of them were remotely low effort, never mind "Tell the AI to do it for you" levels of lazy and thoughtless.
What makes AI music slop in a way that crappy pop isn't comes down to human involvement and expression. Do you know why there are fans of B-Movies and terrible movies? Because they're still an insight into the minds of the people who made them. If AI's wrote great code, if they made work so much more efficient (for everyone, not just the person generating crap for others to deal with) then it would at least be a useful utility, but that's not how it works or can work: hallucination is inevitable and impossible to fully stop, so all outputs must be carefully checked.
It wastes energy, it wastes money, and then wastes your time or someone else's when your substandard efforts require human intervention.
????
The whole point of tractors, trains, and casting iron was to remove effort. Asking an AI to do your bookkeeping for you is not any more lazy than driving a car or sending a voice text.
I think generative LLMs and their usefulness is a different topic. But if we're talking about "slopware" we're talking about software applications designed to handle menial tasks.
Asking a machine to think for you is absolutely different than asking it to expend physical effort for you. If you can't see the difference than frankly this is kind of pointless.
Having a calculator add numbers for you is having a machine think for you. Your computer is doing an awful lot of creative problem solving on your behalf to serve this page to you.
It sounds like you don't see a difference between thinking and creativity?
Calculators don't think for you any more than a slide-rule or a pen and paper does. It takes values and operations that you instruct and then all it does is the part that's entirely deterministic and repetitive. My computer is an extension of the same thing, and most of those extensions don't reflect a replacement of anyone's thinking. No one was previously able to send electronic signals and reconstruct them into web pages for example, that's a new and unique capability that augments our own. "Write my blog post or my code for me" is an entirely different prospect which yes includes, but isn't limited to creativity.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/12/opinion/ai-software-codin...