When dictionary editors across multiple publishers converged on the same word of the year for 2025, the choice was not inspiring or transformative or resilient. It was slop. For the artist and creator behind After Skool, that single syllable landed like a diagnosis, but also, strangely, like a reason for optimism. The question worth sitting with is not why AI flooded the world with forgettable content, but what that flood is quietly pushing humans toward.
Every tool we pick up costs us something we don’t notice right away
The argument begins long before silicon. Agriculture gave humanity reliable food and security, and in the same motion severed the sense that every plant and animal carried a sacred spirit. Writing, as Socrates described in a philosophical myth found in Plato’s Phaedrus, was presented by the Egyptian god Thoth to King Thamus as a potion for memory and wisdom. Thamus pushed back, predicting that people who relied on external written symbols would ‘hear much without being properly taught, leading them to appear wise while remaining ignorant.’ Electricity lit up cities and erased the night sky. GPS eliminated the practiced internal sense of direction that once let people orient themselves across landscapes. Each tool delivered something obvious and took something subtle, and the loss rarely became visible until generations later.
AI is following the same pattern at a pace that compresses those generational lags into years. The worry about job replacement is real and widely documented. But something else is happening alongside it, something the word ‘slop’ itself reveals. People named the phenomenon. They identified it and rejected it. That act of collective naming suggests that on some level, audiences can already feel the difference between content rooted in lived experience and content assembled by a system that has never had to struggle toward anything.
Meaning cannot be manufactured, and AI has never once suffered for its work
This is the core of the After Skool case. AI does not know what hard work is because it has never encountered genuine struggle. It will never feel shame for being wrong, or the specific joy that comes from failing a hundred times and finally breaking through. As the creator put it directly: ‘Wrestling with suffering, discomfort, risk, and adversity is an integral part of what truly makes us feel alive.’ A painting or a piece of music produced without that substrate of experience is, in his framing, like a gift with dazzling wrapping paper but nothing inside. It may please the senses. It does not touch the heart.
The YouTube channel Medieval Mindset, cited in the source, argues that the 2030s will become a new renaissance for a specific reason: ‘The AI flood will make unsimulated humanity the ultimate luxury good.’ The prediction is that AI can only replace drudgery, and once drudgery is replaced, what remains is the work that requires a soul. An economy of quantity gives way to an economy of quality. Carpenters take pride in a handcrafted chair again. Businesses put hand-drawn labels on their products. A human speaker’s unrehearsed pause, a guitar string’s squeak under a sliding finger, a waiter who gets the order slightly wrong and laughs about it, all of these become the signal rather than the noise.
There is also a generational data point that the creator flags with genuine surprise: a growing number of Gen Z and younger adults have traded smartphones for basic phones, committed to physical books, and deliberately sought face-to-face experience. They are not doing this because someone told them to. They are doing it because they can feel what is being taken.
The animator who still cringes at his old work
After Skool’s creator is candid about his own process in a way that lands differently than a manifesto. He has no content strategy. He makes videos about things he is personally curious about. Looking back at earlier work, he says plainly that he cringes at who he used to be. That cringe is the point. The reward for the struggle, in his telling, is not what you produce. It is who you become while producing it.
That distinction, between the artifact and the transformation it causes in the person making it, is exactly what AI cannot replicate. A model trained on the entire archive of human output can generate the artifact. It cannot undergo the transformation.
The word slop caught on because people recognized something real in it. That recognition, collective, unprompted, and widespread enough to reach dictionary editors, is what makes the current moment feel less like a collapse and more like the restless moment just before something new insists on beginning.
