A classmate types the professor’s questions into an LLM and reads the response aloud in class. A friend asks ChatGPT how to respond to a text from a love interest to get the right tone. Your coworker runs every email through artificial intelligence (AI) to sound more professional.
The temptation to be perfect is overwhelming. I’m sure you’ve felt it too. Creighton’s culture of excellence makes our students especially susceptible to the perfectionist mindset, and the solution is right there: ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude are ready to extend a hand and bring you into their slick, smooth, flawless world.
We call it “slop” –– the slightly unnerving, mass-produced output from generative AI –– but “slop” is a bit of a misnomer. AI slop is highly polished and sounds and looks like the perfect answer to any question.
I’ve noticed my peers, and even myself, using AI to avoid the pain of making a mistake. When I want to sound like I know what I’m talking about, I can find the words with a quick prompt on ChatGPT. Faking-it-till-you-make-it is easier than ever. And when everyone else has access to the right words, the embarrassment of making a mistake is even greater.
A necessary part of growing up –– trial and error –– has gone out of fashion. The next generation of adults are now able to skip one of the hardest parts of growing up. Typically, when we don’t know how to act in a new environment, we make mistakes and say the wrong thing. We watch others and figure it out. Now, we can offload the emotional weight of a difficult social interaction and make ourselves seem more confident, more educated.
In the coming years, I predict we will see an increase in the popularity of imperfections in art and design; a rebellion from the stick style of an artificially-generated image. Already, the Japanese term “wabi-sabi,” the practice of accepting the beauty of imperfection and incompleteness, is making its rounds on the internet. I only hope that the same value of human quality will return to our educational system and social lives.
Creighton has AI policies for academic integrity, but not for making us more human. Embarrassment and awkwardness are necessary parts of life, proof that the system is working. Yet in our rush to optimize every interaction, we’ve begun treating it like a flaw to eliminate. Making mistakes should be encouraged, not outsourced.
What makes slop slop is the lack of depth or feeling. By trading every imperfect moment for a polished version, we lose the very friction that shapes us and risk becoming as hollow, shallow and cold as the slop itself.