The word slop is doing useful work. It names something everyone recognises and nobody had a term for: content that is grammatically perfect, structurally correct, entirely fluent, and completely empty.
AI content sounds generic because the model produces the statistical average of everything written on a topic unless given specific instruction. The fix has two parts: supply information only your business has before generating, and run an editorial pass that removes hedging, unattributable claims, and filler. Editing alone cannot rescue output from a brief that contained nothing specific.
The tells
Once you can name these you cannot unsee them, which is the point.
The throat-clearing opener. "In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape." "Now more than ever." Any sentence establishing that the topic exists and is important before saying anything about it.
Hedged non-claims. "Can help improve." "May contribute to." "Often leads to." Every one is a sentence that has been drained of the risk of being wrong, and with it the possibility of being useful.
Rule of three everywhere. Three adjectives, three benefits, three-part structures, relentlessly, because it is the most common rhythm in the training data.
Conclusions that restate the introduction. "In conclusion, as we have seen, X is an important consideration for businesses looking to Y."
Zero specifics. No number, no name, no date, no example. The clearest tell of all, and the one that survives the most editing.
The unearned authority voice. "It is essential to." "Businesses must." Instruction with nothing behind it.
The editorial pass
Run this on any draft before it goes anywhere. It takes about ten minutes on a thousand words.
| Check | Action |
|---|---|
| Delete the first paragraph | It is usually setup. Start where the content starts. |
| Find every hedge | Commit or cut. "Can help improve" becomes a claim or disappears. |
| Count the specifics | Under three numbers, names, or examples per 500 words, the piece is empty. |
| Check every claim | If you cannot source it, cut it. Do not soften it. |
| Read the last paragraph | If it restates the piece, delete it and end on the last real point. |
| Read one section aloud | Anything you would not say to a customer gets rewritten. |
The read-aloud test catches more than the others combined. Your ear knows immediately.
A worked pass
Before, 62 words:
In today's competitive marketplace, effective follow-up can help improve conversion rates for businesses of all sizes. Many companies find that implementing a structured approach to lead nurturing often leads to better outcomes. By leveraging the right tools and strategies, organisations can unlock significant value and drive meaningful growth across their customer acquisition efforts.
Apply the checks. Opener is setup, delete. Three hedges. Zero specifics. Two banned words. Nothing here is false and nothing here is information.
After, 58 words:
Most small businesses lose deals to silence rather than to price. An inquiry arrives on Tuesday, the week gets busy, and by Friday the person has contacted two competitors and one of them replied. Four sequences fix nearly all of it: new inquiry, post-purchase, lapsed customer, review request. Each takes a few hours to build and then runs for years.
Same length. The second contains a specific failure mode, a timeline, a count, four named things, and a build estimate. It also takes a position, which the first carefully avoided.
The structural fix, which matters more
Here is the thing that limits how much editing can achieve: you cannot edit specifics into existence.
If the brief contained no numbers, no examples, and no opinions, no amount of polishing produces them. You will end up with tighter generic content, which is still generic.
The fix happens before generation. A proper brief includes a section for what only you know: your figures, situations you have seen, positions you hold and why. Ten minutes there saves an hour of editing and produces something a competitor cannot replicate, because they do not have your specifics.
The rule I would hold to: if a piece could have been written by someone who has never done the work, it does not ship.
Why generic content is worse than none
It is tempting to think average content is neutral. It is not.
Publishing forgettable material teaches your audience that reading your work is not worth the time. That lesson persists. When you eventually publish something genuinely good, the people who might have valued it have already learned to skip you.
There is a search dimension too. Content that fails to satisfy the person who clicked signals to search engines that the page did not answer the query, and that signal accumulates across a site.
Meanwhile the bar for standing out has gone down rather than up, because so much of what is being published now is interchangeable. One piece that says something only your business knows will outperform forty that say what everyone knows. Which is an argument for less, better.
Make the standard survive you
Everything above is a set of judgments. Judgments that live in one person's head do not survive that person being busy, and they do not transfer to a freelancer or a new hire.
So write them down. The banned words, the claims you cannot make, the specifics requirement, the read-aloud test. That document is a two-hour job and it is what turns "I would know it if I saw it" into something anyone can apply.
The four questions
If you remember nothing else, run these before anything goes out:
- Is every factual claim something we can support?
- Does this sound like us, or like anyone?
- Is there anything specific in here?
- Would I be comfortable if a customer asked where that number came from?
Two minutes. It is the difference between using AI and being used by it.
Eric Howard
Founder of SteelAIQ and a chief marketing officer with more than twenty years running marketing organizations across enterprise software, manufacturing, and consumer brands. Based in Pittsburgh.
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