Exposed. The 7 Deadly AI-Slop Sins That Cost Your Reputation

AI slop is poisoning LinkedIn. And users have had enough. They basically put the entire business model of the modern knowledge worker on trial. That's really the only way to describe it.

When you are a consultant or provide any other kind of knowledge-based services, then your product is your brain. And if you just look at the surface level, scrolling through LinkedIn (or Twitter, for that matter) right now, the mood in the industry feels different.

It's a party. It really is.

Everyone is popping champagne.

It feels like a golden age for productivity. You talk to consultants, you talk to founders, and they're all saying the same thing: "I have finally cloned myself. I'm everywhere."

They're using AI to write faster. They're on LinkedIn five days a week, three times per day. They have a newsletter. They're churning out these white papers. The bottleneck used to be: "I just don't have time to write." And the general consensus is that the bottleneck is gone.

But here is the thing. AI-content building is on fire, and everyone is inside, admiring the warmth. If you are sitting there feeling relieved because you can finally be everywhere with half the effort, I have some very bad news.

You are probably about to lose your pricing power. You are probably about to lose your margin. And if you aren't really careful, you might lose your business entirely.

You might be confusing efficiency with effectiveness.

In the knowledge economy, those are two very different metrics. They aren't even on the same axis.

Efficiency is just how fast you can produce a unit of content. It's a factory metric. That's what the corporate world does and lives by. Effectiveness is whether anyone cares and whether it actually makes a difference. The best corporate offers are outcome metrics, like revenue or client satisfaction.

As a German-born, I learned that in my first job in the US. I was shocked by how hard Americans worked and how little they got done compared to how I had been brought up.

I didn't know yet then that corporate life promotes mediocracy. So, I beat all the KPIs in half the time. Naturally, my colleagues did not like that. Instead of asking me how they, too, could be more effective, they started sabotaging me.

When you stand out in the corporate world, it treats you like a virus. It'll fight you until you either surrender or you leave.

That describes very well how I feel AI is manipulating us. Don't stick out. Comply. That's what my LinkedIn feed reads like.

What we are actually seeing is not a golden age of insight. It's a crisis of Low effort sameness. This is consistent across all the market analyses I am currently reviewing.

We are drowning.

We're in a sea of smooth, perfectly grammar-checked hallucinations of competence that achieve nothing. What we need to wrestle with today is simple, but it's pretty brutal.

If you use AI to sound professional, you are training your clients to ignore you.

You can be posting five times a day and become even more invisible than if you posted nothing at all. How is that possible? It's the phenomenon of the invisible consultant. You're there physically. Your post is in the feed. The pixels are lighting up the screen, but it just slides right off the brain. There's no friction. It leaves no mark.

The core fight isn't about getting likes anymore. That game is about margin. It's about your bank account. If a client can predict your next sentence because it sounds exactly like the statistical average of the Internet, why on earth would they ever pay a premium for your advice?

The stakes are 100% financial.

The stakes are existential. Can a boutique firm survive if it is indistinguishable from a generic large language model? If the answer is 'yes', you have a problem. If I can prompt ChatGPT to give me the same advice you charge $10,000 a month for, your retainer is gone. It just evaporated into the cloud.

We need to figure out the cure. We must make specificity the currency of trust.

I'm tired of being told I'm going to be replaced by a prompt engineer.

People are tired of hearing about the tools. They're tired of the whole gold rush energy, where everyone is selling shovels. But slop fatigue is different. It is much more dangerous because it's subconscious and insidious.

So let's start with the diagnosis. We have these two terms floating around: AI hype fatigue and AI slop fatigue.

AI “hype fatigue” is the burnout people feel when AI hype keeps escalating. Every week, someone claims a new “breakthrough,” a new “agent,” a new “replacement for humans.” Combined with tool fatigue, it's the ultimate death-by-hype combo. Tool fatigue is “too many apps.” Height fatigue is “too much claiming.” Put both together, and your audience tunes out.

Slop fatigue is exhaustion from volume and sameness. The feed fills with smooth, generic content. Your brain learns that it will not be rewarded for paying attention. You stop reading. Slop looks professional. That is why it spreads. It trains buyers to treat expertise like a commodity. They skim, shrug, and keep scrolling.

The crime scene is the LinkedIn feed.

The trend shows up fast.

A post opens with a big, safe claim. It follows with tidy bullets. It ends with a motivational close. Everything reads smoothly. Nothing sticks. Readers get a strange feeling. Sentence one makes sentence three predictable. Predictable text triggers distrust. Once a buyer predicts the next line, credibility drops. Premium pricing drops with it.

The McDonald’s effect.

AI slop feels like eating a Happy Meal at McDonald’s. Full stomach. Sluggish brain. Energy dip. That is what slop does to attention. It fills the feed and leaves people starving for substance. And it changes behavior.

People ration attention. They assume “this is AI.” The assumption spreads across the platform. Real experts get hit, too.

Why this hurts consultants first.

Consulting sells judgment. Buyers pay for what to do next when the data is messy, the team is political, and time is short.

Slop hides judgment behind safe language. Safe language makes every consultant sound the same. Same-sounding consultants get shopped on price. That is the AI discount. It turns premium advice into a menu item.

The 7 deadly AI slop sins.

These sins trip the reader’s prediction engine. They whisper, “average text ahead.”

1. The fake urgency opener “In today’s fast-paced digital landscape…” This line burns the most expensive real estate in the post. It warns that a generic take is coming.

2. The urgency claim has no stakes. “More important than ever…” More important than what? More important for whom? More important by when?

3. The corporate setup line. “To stay competitive in today’s dynamic market…” A suit-shaped sentence. Zero receipts.

4. The manager-speak command. “Leaders must optimize workflows…” A command with no constraint, no order, no proof.

5. The fancy teamwork line. “Foster a culture of cross-functional collaboration…” It sounds smart. It floats. It never touches a real meeting, a real budget, or a real deadline.

6. The vague improvement promise. “By streamlining processes…” Streamlining what? For which team? In what sequence? What broke last time?

7. The growth fortune cookie. “Drive growth.” Growth is a result. Results need numbers. Numbers need context.

And am I the only one who tunes out when I see the feckin' em dash? Or do you, too, immediately interpret that as "written by AI. Next."

The “too perfect” trap.

Slop often reads polished. Humans write differently under pressure. They take a side and, in return, trade something away. They risk being wrong. They tell personal stories of struggle.

That's why I told you about my first job in the US and strategically placed the word 'feckin'' in this article. And I claimed that corporate life promotes mediocracy. That's how I draw the line and trade something. When I have these conversations with HR people, they are typically split. Those who agree with me and those who try to tell me that it's not as bad as I describe it.

AI does not do that. It wants to please both sides. It will write something like: "Corporate life often promotes mediocrity, yes. It is not a moral failure. It is math. Large orgs optimize for stability. Stability rewards low-variance behavior." I won't take a stance.

Buyers feel the difference. They trust the person who can carry risk with them.

The 30-second test.

Read the first sentence of the last LinkedIn post you published. Ask one thing: "Can a smart model predict sentence three?" If the answer is yes, rewrite. Predictability is the scent of slop.

The other questions you can ask yourself is: "Did I draw a line? Did I take a stance? Did I inspire action with consequences?

Slop dies when consequences show up.

Consequences look like money, time, risk, and embarrassment. The messy parts.

A real example:

A team launches on Tuesday. By Wednesday morning, support tickets jump 400% because a legacy integration with Salesforce breaks. The team pauses the rollout. Refunds hit $50,000. Apology emails go to the first 200 users. Then the leader publishes the exact change made to the QA checklist so the breakdown never repeats.

That story carries weight. It carries a cost. It carries risk. It earns attention. AI would write it like this:

A team launches on Tuesday. By Wednesday morning, support tickets jump because a legacy Salesforce sync starts failing. The integration had been quietly relying on an older authentication setup and a set of assumptions about data shape. After the release, the sync begins rejecting requests and dropping updates...

And so on... Empty calories. You can feed that to your audience and get traction. It's OK if you are selling a commodity, such as cheap SEO articles, or if you're a news aggregator. Yes, good enough is fine. McDonald's is good enough. After all, McDonald's is a highly profitable company. And that's OK.

But McDonald's is not a boutique consultant. You don't go to McDonald's for custom nutritional advice or a bespoke dining experience. We are talking about high-ticket experts here, people who sell judgment. And in that world, good enough equals commodity.

The receipts that make a LinkedIn post believable.

Use this six-part scan before posting.

1. Specify the buyer. “Series B SaaS founder with churn above 6%.”

2. State the constraint. “Zero budget until next quarter.”

3. Put numbers on the table. “Tickets up 400%.” “Refunds at $50,000.”

4. State the trade. “Shipped later to avoid rework.”

5. Describe the weak point. “Legacy integration breaks the sequence.”

6. Share a decision rule. “If X happens, we do Y. No meeting.”

These receipts force specificity. Specificity forces trust.

A 14-day reputation drill.

This drill protects credibility and increases qualified conversations.

• Cut posting volume in half for 14 days.

• Publish only posts that include one constraint, one number, and one decision rule.

• Track one metric: qualified replies in DMs and email.

Likes are cheap. Conversations pay. You might get less engagement, but you'll get more quality conversations that lead to something. I cannot tell you how many people reach out to me after I publish my newsletter to thank me for the insights. You'll never know about it, because quality conversations and sales happen in the inbox, not in the feed.

Part of the reason people do not engage with your content is that they resist taking a side. They fear that a client, partner, investor, prospect, or boss will see that and judge them. It's understandable that they would rather reach out in private. The question is: "What's more important to you, impressions and likes, or sales?"

Next step:

The most influential people in the world do three things:

1. They make people think differently.

2. They challenge their audience to take new action.

3. They role model the way, because no one believes the message if they don't believe the messenger.

Be that person. Open the last LinkedIn post you wrote, then rewrite. Add one constraint, one stance, one trade-off, one consequence, and one new action you want people to take.

Then republish and see the difference it makes.

About Andrew Lawless

Andrew Lawless helps entrepreneurs keep pricing power when AI makes everyone sound the same. He builds decision-rule writing and sales systems that force stakes, numbers, and trade-offs into public work. That proof removes suspicion and moves premium buyers into paid conversations.

His method is simple. Use AI for drafts and admin. Keep judgment, scars, and consequences in your voice. If your next post had to earn a $50,000 retainer, what constraint, stance, trade-off, consequence, and action would you put on the table?

Find out here: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-69067138b0c08191b80f18da2dce7462-lawless-operatortm-the-original-intelligence-gpt