The internet's been getting a bit tired lately. Tired of scrolling past another image or video that's technically perfect and completely empty, another caption that reads like nobody actually wrote it. We've all felt it. Now people are saying it out loud (or at least typing it).
If you’ve been doing the rounds on social media, you might’ve noticed a phrase turning up on your feed: “your AI slop bores me.” Nobody's thinking hard when they post it. It's a reflex, dropped into a comment section without a second thought.
The image itself started life late last year, posted by an anti-generative-AI Facebook page as a riff on an older "your politics bore me" template. It was designed for one job: to be pasted under any obviously AI-generated post as a one-image dismissal. And it worked exactly as intended: it spread from comment section to comment section, becoming a kind of shorthand nobody needed explained. You saw the grubby image of the bored kid on his throne of soft drinks, and you knew immediately what it meant: this is soulless, and I clocked it in under a second.
The GIF matters less than what's happened to the phrase since. It's outgrown the image. People say it so often now that it's closer to a diagnosis than a joke. It’s fed into an entire wave of “AI fatigue” commentary: YouTube essays with millions of views, a Last Week Tonight segment, even online games built on the idea. A throwaway comment has turned into one of the most accurate pieces of cultural criticism going.
There's something real underneath the joke. People can feel when something was made with them in mind, and they can feel when it wasn't. And here's the bit that should worry advertisers: they're getting faster at telling which is which.
That distinction has always mattered in this industry. But it matters more now, for a fairly boring economic reason: polished and plausible got cheap. Anyone can knock out a decent stock image and an on-brand caption in the time it takes to make a coffee. So competence isn't impressive anymore. What sets a brand apart now is the stuff that's hard to fake: a real point of view, and a real relationship with people who'd notice if you disappeared.
And that speaks volumes to us here in Aotearoa. He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata. (What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people.)
We were writing about where AI fit into our world years before “slop” was a word anyone used. We said it could sharpen things up and speed them along, but that it still needed the strategic and creative lens you only get from people who've lived a bit. We also said AI draws on the genericness of the web, which means it draws on all of the web's biases too. Turns out that's a fairly accurate description of slop.
Since then, we've been putting that thinking into practice. Generative AI is a real part of how we work and we're not precious about it. We just treat an AI-generated image the way we'd treat a stock photo: a starting point. What turns a starting point into something worth publishing is what we call HI — Human Intervention. Someone who's actually seen the thing, heard the room, and has a view about it. That's what gets you work you'd put your name on.
It's also why a throwaway reaction GIF has landed harder than any AI fatigue think piece. Someone felt what you felt and said it in one image instead of a thousand words. People can tell the difference between that and something manufactured to sound relatable, even when they can't explain how.
To be clear, we're not saying no AI. Used well, it's a brilliant tool for speed, and for getting unstuck. But there's a difference between using a tool to get to an idea faster and using one instead of having an idea. “Your AI slop bores me” is just the internet's way of saying it can tell which one you did.
That instinct isn't going anywhere. The work that stands out will be the work that came from somewhere… and someone.
Keen to talk about your next campaign? Let's kōrero.
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