Before Slop, After Slop

We divide all of human history into two eras: BC and AD.

We're going to divide internet history the same way.

Before Slop and After Slop. BS and AS.

Right now we're living in the final years of Before Slop. We can still mostly tell what's real and what's fake online. We get tripped up sometimes, but between our own judgment and a few trusted sources, we figure it out.

I think that era is ending, and I wanted to share a few thoughts on preparing for what’s next. 

⌛️ The Line Is Closer Than You Think

Remember the Pope in the white puffer jacket? Millions of people believed it, shared it, complimented the drip. It was Midjourney. That was 2023 when this technology was still in its infancy. The fake image was believed for hours before the internet figured it out.

By 2025, an AI-generated band called The Velvet Sundown hit 1M+ monthly Spotify listeners, showing up on major playlists between human artists, before anyone realized that there were no real musicians involved. 

By 2026, the fake content stopped pretending to be otherwise. The song "First Time in San Juan" went viral with a Suno tag right in the caption. Almost everybody knew it was AI, but all of TikTok still danced and lip-synched to it anyway. It’s becoming one of the defining songs of the summer. My bet is an AI-generated song like this charts and gets nominated for a Grammy by 2028.

In three years, we went from fooled, to outpaced, to not even asking.

Meanwhile, security researchers estimate more than half of all internet traffic is now bots. And the models train on the internet itself, which means they're increasingly training on their own output.

Slop in, slop out.

🪪 People: the New Verification Layer

Now, let’s think about life in the After Slop era. A photo goes viral of Taylor Swift kissing someone who isn't Travis Kelce. Nobody trusts it. So what does everyone do? They check TMZ to see if it’s actually true.

I do this. And I think many of you already do, too. It's why we often add "Reddit" to all of our Google searches (pre-Chat or Claude). You're hunting for one human who used the product, somewhere in an ocean of SEO sludge.

The trusted source becomes the arbiter of what’s real.

In After Slop, people stop trusting what they see and start trusting who they know.

The most valuable asset on the internet shifts from attention to trust. 

The person – or the human-led brand – becomes the verification layer.

⛰️ The One Asset AI Can't Build

A podcaster who has shown up every week for five years has something that AI cannot replicate: five years of connecting with their audience.

AI can fake the voice, the face, and even the back catalog.

But it cannot fake the years people spent watching.

We have a name for this at PRC: compounded mastery. The trust a person accumulates by doing the work in public, in one domain, over years. Capital can't buy it and AI can't manufacture it because it lives in other people's memory.

In this After Slop age, building something new will of course still be possible, just much harder: harder to be trusted and harder to be seen in an internet where human and AI content blur together.

📣 What To Do About It

Start now.

Write something. Go on record. Ship in public. Show up weekly somewhere, connecting with your community on your specific interests and expertise. 

And if you're becoming the verification layer of your niche, we want to hear from you: [email protected].

The trust you build now is the one thing AI can't counterfeit. Build it or get lost in the slop.

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