I haven’t posted any personal essays or poetry on this site since my dog died, in the summer of 2024. Since then, something has changed here in the digital eco-sphere. It started slow, but it seems to have picked up steam. There is a responsiveness to social media and the digital scroll that there wasn’t before—the feed seems to know exactly what I need, and instantly moves to give me what I want to see. I have no doubt it has to do with AI.
The creep-factor of AI keeps me from writing more publicly online, and the world in general seems to be devolving within its discourse. Everything is exhausting. Never would I have guessed that just existing in this reality at this moment in time would take huge leaps of intellectual acrobatics just to stay sane and barely afloat. Even saying that I doubt that I might count as ‘afloat’—maybe delusional? But I might already be under the water and wouldn’t even know it. How can I unless I know what is real?
And the digital world continues to flood us, actively working to obscure the REAL real…
If I eat all my vegetables, will I still get sick?
The term ‘alphabet slop’1 refers to “the massive wave of low-effort, AI-generated “educational” videos on platforms like YouTube that use the English alphabet and animals as hooks to target toddlers and preshcoolers.” Essentially, fake educational content. If you have kids, you know exactly what this is and you hate it with every fiber of your being. You do everything in your power to get your children’s brains away from it. But it’s seeped into the cracks—it’s impossible to wipe away entirely.
Recently I read an article2 on the website Medium, titled ‘The History of Slop.’ From the author:
“What once filled troughs now fills timelines. AI models trained on synthetic text. News sites filled with rewritten fragments of the same press release. Search results collapsing into noise. The feed consumes the residue of the last feed. Each cycle slightly duller, slightly emptier, slightly more self-referential. This is the invisible ecology of slop. An economy of leftovers that no one bothers to compost. Slop will always exist. The crisis begins when we stop noticing. The danger is that it becomes the baseline. When we stop recognizing the difference between nourishment and waste, we stop filtering. We call the byproduct the product.”
This gets after a deep existential crux that I’ve struggled with and pondered since joining the echelons of the blogging masses in 2015. Writing here, in the digital realm, am I just a waste product, the byproduct mentioned above, that got through the filter and into the wider world? Am I muddying the internet waters with whatever crap comes out of the ether and through my brain cells and into my fingers and out onto a screen? Is it useful? Is it worthy to have my thoughts out in the world, off the journal page, to be swirling in someone else’s brain alongside my own?
Is my writing just drowning out something else that might be more valuable? I’m taking someone’s eyeballs away when they could be reading an ACTUAL intellectual piece with backed up research. Something real.
Why read what I have to say?3
Hidden here in this line of questioning is a deep unconscious paradigm, having been raised by the 90’s, which instilled into us (speaking as an older millennial) how bad it was to be ‘corporate’ and to ‘sell out’ to the ‘man.‘ So when we try to be genuine, altruistic, “authentically” online, a version of us shows up behind it that is scoffing at the whole thing. A version that doesn’t take it seriously. We want to be honest—we really, really want to be—but there is an edge of mistrust. Because why would we share our deepest selves with you, a stranger on the internet? A big tech bro who is mining my thoughts into a database for some corporate shareholder? What have you done to earn that? We are just “selling out” emotionally to appeal to others and form digital connections that (we know deep down) are only a shadow of the real thing. All in service of a performative self. A performative, digital ‘life.’
This ends up feeling like a cop-out of real authenticity. We sell out our true selves by existing in two places at once: online and real life. Because the REAL us, the AUTHENTIC and fleshy us, cannot be refashioned through a social media page. We cannot accurately be seen as a webpage splash banner. We cannot be truly known through posed images and soundbites and premeditated captions and vibes. And worse yet – packaged and sold as a personal ‘brand.’ How can any of that be REAL? How could we ever find genuine, digital expression within all that capitalistic noise?
How can we ensure we aren’t succumbing to the byproduct of the thing, instead of the original?
Words get us close. Closer than a social media page, anyways. And we have been writing our little hearts out, spilling our secret selves out to the universe, since the written word was invented. Some of us (guilty as charged!) express ourselves through words on a page much better than we do in person, our spoken syllables muttered in juts and jabbers from our primordial mouths. But when given a keyboard or a pen, our thoughts somehow unchain themselves from the oblivion. They’re taken off the leash. There isn’t any eye contact or expectations of a volley in conversation, so the thoughts can find their true landing place.4
The secret (real) self can be revealed.
So with the internet being overrun with a mass amount of slop nowadays—both human and machine-made, but fast becoming mostly machine-made—in the service of keeping your eyeballs on the screen and scrolling for eternity, it is very hard to feel like anything posted online is doing anyone any good. That it’s only adding to the noise and feeding the AI crawlers that are watching and reading and logging everything fed to it. All in service of you passively engaging with it and ingesting their sloppy words, taking them in as though they are true and real. And thus, the feedback loop grows dimmer and less profound. The well becomes poisoned.
The secret (real) self is lost.
No longer are words the excavators of the soul. Now? They have been relegated to digital noise.
Is the internet giving ‘Ick’ now?
Since starting this blog in 2015, I would usually get a few visits a month, maybe 10-20, which seems pretty normal for a site with no activity. I’d get much more if I posted regularly, which makes logical sense. But the traffic for my webpage has been off the charts recently, and looking back on the stats, it all started on January 5th, 2026. I suspect that on that day, someone sitting atop a tech throne in Silicon Valley turned something on, and nothing on the internet was ever safe again. Since that fateful day, I get hits all the damn time. Like 20 to 40 views a day. All of my posted thoughts and opinions and essays—touched by some invisible robot hand, plucking them for keywords, SEO, pulling words out of my mouth and into their own pseudo mouths. I feel violated and am now working to block this strange traffic that happens all the time. Last April I had over 500 views in that month alone! And I posted nothing! There isn’t any reason for this kind of trend when I’m not marketing my site, posting regularly, or even engaging with it. I’ve only come to notice this recently.
The digital fingers are here even now, sifting and cataloging my words. And it feels… gross.
I have come to learn that most of the reputable websites have AI blocker codes in place that prevent their words from being ceaselessly fingered. And while that leaves anyone without this protection able to grab more digital eyes which MIGHT lead to more actual eyes, we’ve essentially been tossed into a food dish for the feasting of the techno-bros and their LLMs, which are always hungry.
Short of shutting down my page and archiving / deleting my past writing and essays, I am tempted to back out of the internet entirely. Data harvesting on socials by big-brother tech is old news these days, but now that there are machine-based algorithms that are pulling information from all over the web—including MY own information, in thoughts and feelings and think pieces—and mashing that together, pushing and deforming it into whatever someone wants at the push of a button or request of a chatroom, is alarming. I don’t want my social sites and my writing to feed anything but engagement with other humans. With actual biological eyeballs. People I know, people who like books and have feelings, people who read what I write and have something to say about it—not bot accounts or harvesters or internet phantoms who are using my words however they wish, feeding an algorithm that I’ll never meet or understand.
I don’t want to contribute to building something that is actively pulling the hairs out of reality and putting them on a dummy wig, a sloppy facsimile, and has the audacity to still call it ‘real.’
I fear that if we are not relentlessly vigilant about questioning what we see, hear, and scroll while in a digital device or ecosystem, that we will fall into the trap that’s been set for us: a trap that looks like the real thing, but is actively being controlled by tech powers and sycophants to make us think and believe whatever they want us to.
But how can we correctly question what is true, what to trust, who is real, when it’s delivered to us through the time-honored and trusted means of the written word, but only as a façade of the true, sparkling thing? How would we know we’re not engaging with truth, when the actual facts have been plucked, restated, watered down, clipped, and reformatted?
If the Lotus blooms from the mud, can Humans bloom from the slop?
After these thoughts have been zigzagging around my brain for countless months with nowhere to go, I have been trying to be offline more—in the physical world, with real books and music and nature and family—but alas! This is easier said than done. I’m a writer and thus bound to my computer even when I’m not working my 9 to 5. The inevitable pied piper ropes me into the pit, over and over again.
This piece is mostly a hopeless rant, but also a desperate wish to be hopeful, even if it might be too late and derealization is already upon us. I see what is happening, and I’m trying to come to grips with it: The internet is not a reliable place to be—which is almost the same message we were taught in high school in the late 90’s, when we used Netscape as a search engine. “None of what you find here are real sources!” The teachers would lecture about the new frontier of the internet, excited by the possibility it presented, but cautionary, standing amidst the droning hum of thirty Macintosh computers piloted by clueless seventeen-year-olds. “You cannot cite a website for your paper. It must be a real publication with verifiable source material!”
Given that anyone with power and money in 2026 could hire a bot farm to manufacture a ‘real’ social media presence out of thin air, pay to create ‘real’ headlines, influence people to have certain opinions and discourse, or have data pulled from the public en masse, and used against ‘those who disagree with them’ through targeted ads and scams that undermine your genuine thoughts and interests….
Is there value in being honest on the internet anymore? Can we show up here as our real selves? Or will that be exploited and mined and logged and turned against us?
It’s ironic, then, to be vomiting out my actual real thoughts here on my personal site for the crawlers to take in. But here it is—served up on a platter! If machines can do it, then I have permission as well?
Dig in minions! Eat my slop!
I hope any real humans reading this leave here with serious doubts that the internet reflects anything close to reality and that nothing is real. I hope you buy a physical book, hold it in your hands and smell the dead trees and ink, and then go looking for those secret inner worlds lurking behind the words that an LLM doesn’t have eyes to see or a mind to coalesce.
Not yet, anyways.
❤ amie
- Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop ↩︎
- Source article: https://medium.com/@hnshah/the-history-of-slop-58b36c1eb01e
I use the term ‘Article’ here loosely. There are no sources cited for the historical data listed, and the cadence, headers and tone of the piece feels very AI generated, although it is not attributed as such. More of a use case to get off the f*#king internet already. ↩︎ - It should be stated loudly that I do not use AI in my writing, and I don’t condone using it in any way. I hate that I have to state this, but I’ll probably have to be loud about it from now on and explicitly state that these words were algorithmically pulled out of my brain, and not culled from an amalgamation of published, stolen work, and presented under the guise of original authorship. ↩︎
- This entire essay was written in a fever dream type-session. I tried to hold back on too much editing in order to preserve the unhinged blurring of delusions that this topic seems to surface in my body. My sincere apologies. ↩︎
