Press, swipe, and swallow.

I was recently saying that the AI mush is starting to feel like vomit that accidentally comes out in the shape of the Mona Lisa. It’s amusing for a moment, but then you remember that it’s actually a texturally unpleasant imitation of something that was much more impressive. Simulacra has never been so gag-worthy.

I don’t think the next shift is going to be about authenticity in the corporate sense. I’m tired of hearing that word. I think it’s actually going to be about texture. We need a crunch and we need more bite. We need sentences that sound like an actual person who didn’t outsource their inner life to a suggestion box.

It’s the same logic behind the lunchtime bowls everyone lives on now. Grain bowls, salad bowls, marketplates...this food has literally been chopped, mushed, and mixed together until it’s basically adult baby food. We reorder or we take the familiar footpath during our one hour lunch breaks. It’s all just warm mush in a compostable container.

We pretend these meals are about health or efficiency, but texturally they’re about settling. Everything difficult has already been handled for us. The food has been deboned and destemmed…there’s no meat left.

At its root, this is what AI slop is too (beyond the newer “slop” that we’ve been referencing). I’m talking about AI that writes your homework, your presentation, your tweets, whatever, and leaves you forfeiting your creativity. At first it feels kind of cool to throw in a prompt and watch easy work appear. But the more you use it, the more obvious it becomes that it’s all just slop. Different topics, same mouthfeel.

What ties it all together is the appeal of not having to decide things for yourself. No chewing, no drafting, no awkward half-formed thought. Your only responsibility becomes to press, swipe, and swallow. The grain bowl and the AI paragraph all represent the same thing. They signal to you that you don’t need to worry because it’s already been chewed for you. The only thing left for you is to swallow.

The thing is that your body notices what your brain is failing to catch onto. Halfway through the bowl, or the sandwich, or the perfectly fine AI thing, there’s a feeling of insatiability…this is okay, but it’s not what I want. You keep going anyway, because starting over feels harder than finishing something you don’t even like. Or even worse, starting something that’s felt too difficult to start.

Mush is safe and that’s the point. It won’t offend anyone on the way down, but it also can’t carry that much meaning. The more we outsource the rough edges of daily life, the more starved we get for anything that feels legitimately ours. We need to learn that it’s okay, and actually kind of awesome if what we make is a bit wrong, a little too spicy, or slightly embarrassing.

The bowls and the auto-drafts aren’t going anywhere. Convenience isn’t going anywhere. But I think the people who stand out will be the ones willing to chew a little. Those are the ones that are able to say the thing that doesn’t slide down as easily and to make something that requires you to actually show up for it.