Transcription
2025 is over. We've moved on into 2026 now.
However, before we fully embrace that transition, before we officially commit to the new year and leave the old one behind, I want to take a few minutes and have a bit of fun at the expense of Microsoft and more specifically at the expense of Microsoft CEO Satia Nadella.
Why, you may ask? Why make fun of this genius level technology executive? Simple. Because he's upset and he doesn't like the fact that people refer to this plague of low-quality AI content rippling across the internet as slop. Funny word, by the way, slop. It's a gross, oozing, disgusting concept meant to degrade the subject, which makes it even more hilarious that Miriam Webster's dictionary in the 2025 words of the year rundown put slop as the very first one.
I've talked about this a little bit recently, but there's actually a very fractured set of definitions for what slop is intended to mean. Some people think that any sort of opinion they disagree with is therefore slop. Those people are very obviously wrong. Others think that low-effort content is slop, often referencing reaction videos here on YouTube, as an example. Those people are getting closer, but still wrong. And the final definition, the correct one, which is echoed here in Miriam Webster, is this quote, "Digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence." End quote.
Just for the sake of clarity, slop is this and this and this. When you prompt an AI model and get back low-quality content, which is damn near all of it, by the way, audio, visual, text, etc., that is slop. You just created big air quotes around that word. You created slop.
I can already smell the comments in the comment section. But that's not real AI productivity. That's the fringes and the outliers and the spam. AI tools are 10xing real workflows. And that's not at all true, but I'll debunk that in a second. The point for right now is that Miriam Webster put slop as their word of the year.
And then like 2 weeks after that or something, Microsoft CEO Satia Nadella wrote this on his personal blog. Quote, "As I reflect on the past year and look toward the one ahead, there's no question 2026 will be a pivotal year for AI. Yes, another one. But this moment feels different in a few notable ways. We have moved past the initial phase of discovery and are entering a phase of widespread diffusion. We are beginning to distinguish between spectacle and substance. We now have a clearer sense of where the tech is headed, but also the harder and more important question of how to shape its impact on the world. We are still in the opening miles of a marathon. Much remains unpredictable amidst this model overhang where capabilities outpacing our current ability to use it to have real-world impact. This is some of what we still need to get right. A new concept that evolves bicycles for the mind such that we always think of AI as a scaffolding for human potential versus a substitute. What matters is not the power of any given model, but how people choose to apply it to achieve their goals. We need to get beyond the arguments of slop versus sophistication and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our theory of the mind that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we relate to each other. This is the product design question we need to debate and answer." End quote.
So, right off the bat, if you disentangle his terminal case of marketing brain, he's basically saying that we need to look at AI as a tool, not a replacement for humans. And then obviously that this new technology is super advanced and shouldn't be regarded as a mere slop producer.
But the thing that makes it so utterly hilarious is that he's not just wrong, he's contradicting himself, practically all of his industry peers, the lion's share of AI research, and the economic reality of basically every single company using it right now. Big claims, I know, and I'll go through one by one with examples, but the most immediate one that I want to get to is Microsoft themselves.
Because not even a single year ago, during a span of time when Microsoft was laying off about 15,000 workers, Satia Nadella was proclaiming far and wide, quote, "We must reimagine our mission for a new era. What does empowerment look like in the era of AI?" And then further down when talking about priorities, he continues, "We need to stay focused on our three business priorities: security, quality, and AI transformation." End quote. He never explicitly says, "You all got fired because of AI." But if you read between the lines in a post about why people are getting laid off, he's basically saying, "Yes, you all got fired because of AI."
Obviously, Microsoft is the company in focus for the video, but the idea that AI is a replacement for human workers isn't exactly a fringe concept right now. According to Anthropic CEO Daario Amod, AI is on the cusp of wiping out over half of all white-collar career opportunities. He says companies and governments need to stop sugarcoating things. Meanwhile, the CEO of Ford, as in Ford Motors, is saying the exact same thing. If you've ever heard of Fiverr, online freelance marketplace, the CEO and founder over there is getting out ahead of a potential story because he issued an internal memo saying, quote, "Here's the unpleasant truth. AI is coming for your jobs." End quote. And all across tech-adjacent industries, the sentiment is practically the same.
Here's the thing, though. Just because big CEOs are saying it doesn't make it true. In fact, I have become utterly convinced over the past several months that these people are complete idiots living in a state of total disconnect from reality. They can actually say polar opposite things compared to each other and still somehow both be completely wrong. Honestly, it's kind of impressive.
That's an ironic term actually, reality, because heavy usage of generative AI such as ChatGPT has become increasingly correlated with straight-up psychosis. Psychotic breaks from reality are happening because of the sycophantic and consistently harmful levels of reaffirmation, even when someone is going down a horribly dangerous rabbit hole. Here's a recent example where a man took diet advice from ChatGPT after telling it he wanted to cut down on sodium chloride intake, which is salt, to which the AI agreed with him relentlessly and suggested replacing it with sodium bromemide. Long story short, he ended up in the hospital with hallucinations after slowly poisoning himself. Generative AI is killing people.
And Satia Nadella is right in one single aspect about this being the beginning of a marathon. But not because of the societal utopian benefits and all of the great applications for the technology. Because of the widespread harm this [ __ ] is now causing to all sorts of different people in ways that we don't even fully understand.
Still, that's an alarmist approach. What about utility? That's the thing I see most often as an argument, but it's not very often. Actually, it's never that I find someone who's able to actually back that up with evidence. Typically, it's just anecdotes. "Well, I use Perplexity or ChatGPT for this and it's good," or some [ __ ] like that.
But let's take a turn and look at Harvard Business Review in association with Stanford, which has a long-running survey collecting data about workflow and general impact of AI tools on average workplaces. Let's just read a paragraph, okay? And keep in mind that the CEO of Microsoft doesn't like that people call AI content slop, even though he wasn't specifically referring to this. Just keep that in the back of your minds. Quote, "A confusing contradiction is unfolding in companies embracing generative AI tools. While workers are largely following mandates to embrace the technology, few are seeing it create real value." And then further down, "In collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab, our research team at BetterUp Labs has identified one possible reason. Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable-looking work that ends up creating more work for their co-workers. On social media, which is increasingly clogged with low-quality AI-generated posts, this content is often referred to as AI slop. In the context of work, we refer to this phenomenon as work slop. We define work slop as AI-generated work content that masquerades as good work but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task." End quote.
Ideally, that begins to demonstrate the comedy of the situation because we're not just talking about cat videos or spam websites. We're talking about the typical standard of content generated by employees who are forced to use these tools, which is now referred to as work slop because of its uselessness.
But it gets even better. I've already referenced this MIT study in previous videos where 95% of companies pushing AI pilot programs are seeing zero return and burning tens of billions of dollars in the process. But the phenomenon goes even deeper, outlined in yet another paper titled "Competence Penalty is a Barrier to the Adoption of New Technology," which articulates quote, "Digital traces from 28,698 engineers at a tech company showed only 41% adopted a generative AI programming tool 12 months after its launch, despite companywide incentives. And then later, engineers using AI received 9% lower competence ratings for identical work, with females penalized more, 13%, than males, 6%. A survey finds that anticipated competence penalty is associated with lower adoption, with stronger effects among female and mature age engineers. These findings reveal a paradox. Technologies intended to enhance productivity may inadvertently undermine their users, impeding adoption and reinforcing inequality." End quote.
It's dry. I get that. A bunch of research papers. But my goal is to demonstrate that the idea of slop isn't just engagement farming you see on social media. The term slop extends directly into the workplace where major companies are attempting to force AI adoption, simultaneously decreasing productivity, wasting capital, and bogging down a professional workplace. Much the same way it's bogging down the creative world and social media and even the broader internet.
Let's do a classic double-tap. Okay, here's another paper from MER (Model Evaluation and Threat Research), but rather than summarizing, I'll just read two parts quickly. Okay, quote, "We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how AI tools at the February to June 2025 frontier affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers. 16 developers with moderate AI experience complete 246 tasks in mature projects on which they have an average of five years of prior experience." And then later, "Before starting tasks, developers forecast that allowing AI will reduce completion time by 24%. After completing the study, developers estimate that allowing AI reduced completion time by 20%. Surprisingly, we find that allowing AI actually increases completion time by 19%. AI tooling slowed developers down." This slowdown also contradicts predictions from experts in economics (39% shorter) and machine learning (38% shorter)." End quote.
I don't know how much more obvious I can make it. AI is not increasing productivity at all. It's decreasing it. Companies are wasting resources on pushing the technology. But even when adopted, which a lot of people have trouble adopting it or don't want to or push back, even when they do adopt it and have expertise in using it in a field that they have 5 years of expertise in, it harms workflow.
You could perhaps argue that this problem will decrease over time, the same argument that people have been making for the past couple of years now. But if nothing else, my hope is that this video adequately demonstrates that at least right now, at the beginning of 2026, and probably all throughout 2026, just like 2025, no one should be reducing their usage of the word "slop" with reference to AI content. If anything, the word "slop" should become even more ubiquitous with AI outputs because that is what they are. AI output is slop in the vast majority of cases, often requiring even more human work than would otherwise be necessary for the project just to fix it.
Satia Nadella inadvertently, I might add, published one of the most hilarious forward-looking AI blog posts I've ever seen. Overrun with marketing buzzword drivel, the few things it did say were patently false to a degree where it felt like he very well may have had Microsoft Copilot write the whole thing for him.
Actually breaking script here. One final example before I wrap up because something he said actually pissed me off a little bit towards the end of the quote that I gave in the beginning. He says, uh, where is it? Let me read it. Uh, "A theory of the mind that accounts for human beings equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools." Cognitive amplifier tools. Okay. Uh, I don't understand how these people have the jobs that they have and earn as much money as they do because generative AI actually carries the risk of cognitive atrophy. This harms your cognitive ability if you use it. Okay? It creates cognitive debt and decreases, like they did EEG scans, it decreases brain activity and like neuron connectivity. It's—it harms your brain. Okay? This is not an amplifier tool. It's brain poison. And yet he's over here writing these, you know, like forward-looking blog posts with all these pontifications about how advanced the technology is. And don't call it slop, even though it's just basically a net negative for everybody. I mean, that like kind of actually annoyed me. Cognitive atrophy is not the same as a cognitive amplifier tool. Dude, get your head out of your ass.
I'm not going to sit here and pretend that there's zero possible applications for AI. I can think of a few right off the bat, off the top of my head, that are decent. But what we have right now, in its most pure form, right, on a foundational level, is slop. It doesn't matter what Satia Nadella or Sam Altman or Elon Musk or any other technology billionaire says. It is slop. And until there's a dramatic shift in overall output, value, or construction, slop it will remain. That's it.
If you want to support the channel, check out the links down below. A special VPN deal, of course. Everybody could use that. Locals and Patreon, channel memberships, etc., etc. Some other deals, but I'll cut it there and stop rambling. As always, thank you all for watching. Question everything and have a nice night.