Hinter Thampson: Episode Zero — The Assignment

Hinter Thampson gets the assignment and enters the human–AI borderlands.

Episode Zero — The Assignment

The Slop Files: Truth in the Shadows

Dispatches from the Human–AI Borderlands

Hinter Thampson

The email arrived at 9:17 on a Tuesday morning, which seemed to me an entirely inappropriate time for anything consequential to happen. I was drinking coffee that had already been reheated twice and contemplating whether journalism had finally become one of those historical occupations, like lamplighting or plague-cart driving, when the publisher wrote to say they were interested.

Go ahead. Five hundred words per encounter. Start with six. Let’s see what happens.

That was it.

No congratulations, no champagne courier at the door, not even an assurance that Western civilisation understood the significance of what had just occurred. I had an assignment. Somebody was prepared to pay me to wander around asking strangers what they thought about AI slop.

There are moments in a man's professional life when he must resist examining too closely the chain of decisions that brought him there. I resisted successfully and, by 11:30, was in a bar.

Not drinking, I should point out. At least not initially. I was conducting research.

The premise of The Slop Files had sounded perfectly reasonable when I proposed it: One question. One person. 500 words. The truth, if we can stand it. The question itself was even simpler: What is AI slop?

I assumed people would have opinions.

This turned out to be the safest assumption I made all day.

The first man I approached was perhaps fifty-five, wearing a blue business shirt and eating something involving calamari. I introduced myself, explained the assignment and asked the question. He stopped chewing.

"AI slop? It's all slop."

"All AI?"

"All of it."

"Have you used AI?"

"No."

"Ever?"

"No."

"Then how do you know?"

He looked at me with the weary compassion of a man discovering that the journalist assigned to interview him was intellectually defective.

"You can tell."

"How?"

"You just can."

I wrote this down because, however the day developed from there, this was journalism.

My second subject was a woman sitting outside with a laptop. She used AI every day and objected violently to the term slop. People had said photography wasn't art, she reminded me. They had said synthesizers weren't music and digital illustration wasn't real illustration, and now they were doing exactly the same thing again.

"So there's no AI slop?" I asked.

"Oh God, yes. Mountains of it."

This seemed promising until I asked how she distinguished the slop from everything else. She thought for a moment, looked at her laptop, then back at me.

"I know it when I see it."

I put down my notebook.

We had encountered a problem.

By late afternoon I had spoken with a university student who used AI to help understand philosophy but would never admit it to his lecturers, an advertising copywriter who complained bitterly about AI-generated copy before quietly revealing that she used it to produce twelve variations of headlines, and a retired schoolteacher who had never knowingly used generative AI but nevertheless spent twenty minutes explaining why it was destroying children's ability to think.

Everyone knew what AI slop was. Nobody could tell me exactly what AI slop was.

More interestingly, the closer I pushed towards a definition, the more the conversations wandered away from artificial intelligence altogether. People began talking about effort and authenticity, then jobs, education, cheating, money, beauty, fear and loneliness. One man began talking about his daughter, although I had asked him nothing whatsoever about his family.

She was twenty-eight, autistic, and apparently had difficulty turning the thoughts inside her head into the kinds of documents workplaces expected people to produce. She had begun using an AI system to help organise those thoughts.

"It doesn't think for her," her father said. "That's what people don't understand. She's finally getting what she thinks out."

He looked down at his beer for a while before adding, almost as an afterthought, "So when someone calls that slop, I get a bit pissed off."

For once, I didn't immediately write anything.

Something had shifted.

I had gone out looking for bad writing and accidentally walked into human territory.

This was inconvenient because the whole point of the assignment, as I understood it, was that I would roam the human–AI borderlands documenting their absurdities. I expected zealots and frauds, prophets and charlatans, corporate evangelists, terrified professors and probably at least one man who believed ChatGPT had become his spiritual adviser. There would undoubtedly be plenty of slop, and I expected to stand comfortably outside it, notebook in hand, recording the spectacle.

After six conversations I was beginning to suspect there was no outside.

AI slop was not simply some substance accumulating across the internet that I could locate and poke with a journalistic stick. It was also a judgement, and every judgement seemed to reveal something about the person making it. The man who had never used AI knew that all of it was worthless. The woman who used it constantly defended the technology while cheerfully acknowledging that it produced mountains of rubbish. The student hid his use. The copywriter publicly condemned what she privately employed. The teacher feared for minds not yet formed. And the father had very little interest in the cultural argument because something called artificial intelligence had helped his daughter participate more fully in the world.

At 6:40 I returned to the first bar, partly from exhaustion and partly because I believe in professional symmetry. The calamari man was gone. His table had been cleared, wiped and reset, and was now occupied by two young people who appeared to be constructing an entire civilisation on their phones.

I ordered whisky and opened my notebook.

At the top of the first page I had written WHAT IS AI SLOP? Underneath were six answers and approximately thirty-seven new questions.

It occurred to me that the publisher had made a serious mistake.

They thought they had commissioned a series about artificial intelligence.

I thought I had proposed one.

Yet somewhere during that first day the assignment had quietly changed shape. I was no longer investigating AI so much as humans standing before a new kind of machine and announcing what they saw reflected there: fear, possibility, fraud, liberation, laziness, access, threat, play, perhaps even themselves.

I opened the laptop and began writing.

The bartender glanced across while polishing a glass and asked what I was working on.

"AI slop," I said.

He laughed.

"Christ. Don't get me started."

My fingers stopped above the keyboard.

I looked at him.

Then I reached slowly for the notebook.

Apparently the publisher was getting Episode One.

And apparently I was getting another drink.