Trends · AI & Content · Brand Voice
Polished, on-brand, and ignored.
Mentions of “slop” jumped 200% last year, and most of them are angry. Audiences can smell mass-produced content now, and the polish that used to signal quality has started to signal the opposite.
Open any local business feed and scroll for a minute. The posts blur into one. Same clean template, same tidy caption, same three neat benefits and a call to action at the bottom. Nothing is wrong with any of it. That is exactly the problem. It is all perfectly fine, and perfectly forgettable.
For years, polish was the goal. If your content looked clean and read smoothly, it signalled that you were serious. That signal has broken.
The slop backlash is real, and it is measurable“Slop” is the word the internet settled on for low-effort, generic, machine-made content. It used to be niche. Last year it went mainstream. Brandwatch tracked a jump of more than 200% in mentions of “slop” across 2025, and 82% of those mentions carry negative sentiment. People are not neutral about this. They are annoyed.
The reason is simple. AI made it possible to produce endless content in seconds, so everyone did. Feeds filled with copy that says nothing, in a voice that belongs to no one. And audiences, who now use these same tools every day, spot it instantly. They know what a machine sounds like because they talk to one too.
As one marketer put it in the Brandwatch research, “Anyone can produce content now, but not everyone can make people actually care.” That gap, between producing and being cared about, is the whole game in 2026.
There is a related shift worth naming. For a decade, brands drifted toward the same minimalist sameness: the same soft palette, the same flat logo, the same careful, inoffensive tone. Call it blanding. It was safe, and safe used to work.
It does not anymore. Brandwatch found positive mentions of being “cringe” rose 25% in 2025. Read that again. The thing that used to kill a brand’s cool factor, trying visibly and caring out loud, is now the thing people reward. Effort is back. Earnestness is back. The brands cutting through are the ones willing to look like they actually care about what they do.
What sounding human actually looks likeThis is not a call to be sloppy. It is a call to be a person. The fix is not less quality. It is more of you. In practice, that means four habits.
Write like you talk. Read the post aloud before it goes out. If you would not say it to a client across a desk, cut it. The stiff, corporate phrasing is the first tell of a machine.
Show the effort, do not hide it. A real opinion, a specific example, a story only your business could tell. Generic advice anyone could have written is exactly what the AI already wrote.
Put a real person in it. A face, a name, a point of view. People trust a person they can see far more than a logo, and the algorithms now favour that too.
Use AI to sharpen, never to fill. Draft with it, cut with it, pressure-test with it. Then make it sound like you before anyone sees it. AI is a good editor and a terrible ghost.
None of this is slower or more expensive than the polished sameness it replaces. It is mostly a decision: to sound like a business run by people, not a template filled in by a bot.
The brands that win in 2026 are not the most polished. They are the most human.
At Ten 15 J.T., this is the standard we hold every piece to before it leaves the building. We use the tools, we just refuse to let them do the thinking. Because in a feed full of content that sounds like everyone, the only thing worth being is unmistakably you.