The 'AI slop' conversation has become its own genre of beige content.

The 'AI slop' conversation has become its own genre of beige content. You know the format: someone posts about how Linkedin is drowning in AI-generated nonsense, offers no real diagnosis, waves their pitchfork and signs off with 'be more human.'

Gets a few hundred likes from people who agree, costs nothing to say and changes nothing.

My hot take is that there was plenty of forgettable content on Linkedin before anyone had access to ChatGPT or its ilk. People have *always* posted things designed to be inoffensive rather than interesting.

Safe observations, industry nods, content that exists to maintain a presence rather than say anything. None of it is new.

The risk of having an opinion has always felt higher for most people than the reward. AI didn't create that instinct, it just made it faster and more accessible.

If you've got nothing to say and no real position to take, AI can now help you produce something that at least looks competent.

Beige was always there. Now, there's just more of it.

When people say 'the solution is to stop using AI' , I don't think they've actually looked at the problem (or reality).

Strip out AI and the underlying decision won't change, even if it's a little less prevalent.

The person who's been posting careful, nobody-will-argue-with-me content for years will carry on doing exactly that. It'll just take them longer to produce it without AI like it did before.

The problem isn't AI, it's the decision to say something while carefully avoiding having an actual point.

We talk about this in our book The Beige Code, which will be released in the next couple of weeks. Watch this space.

++ I'm Nigel. I built Ghostart and the Beige-ometer because LinkedIn has enough forgettable content already. I help professionals write posts people actually want to read.