Why 2026 could be the year of anti-AI marketing | CNN Business

"It's getting harder to escape slop, the artificial intelligence-generated pablum that has crept into our colleagues' slide decks, our social media feeds, our news outlets, even our real-estate listings. Slop oozes into everything, wrote the editors of Merriam-Webster, who chose slop as their 2025 word of the year. Like slime, sludge, and muck, slop has the wet sound of something you don't want to touch."

"AI slop tends to evoke innocuous images of Shrimp Jesus or big-eyed cat soap operas. But the slop imagery is getting more sophisticated, creating a crisis of confidence among even those of us who grew up with the internet and fancy themselves expert, or at least decent, spotters of fake stuff. The usual tells unnatural lighting, awkwardly rendered hands, incongruous background images have been largely smoothed over."

"Last month, the radio and podcasting giant iHeartMedia rolled out a guaranteed human tagline, promising users that it won't use AI-generated personalities or play AI-generated music. The San Antonio-based audio company's own research found 90% of its listeners even those who use AI tools themselves want their media created by humans. It's important for us to remember, as marketers, that we're in a very delicate position within a turbulent time,"

Artificial intelligence-generated 'slop' has proliferated across presentations, social feeds, news outlets, and real-estate listings, reducing confidence in digital content. The term slop captures unsettling, low-quality AI outputs that increasingly mimic realistic imagery and audio, smoothing over past detection tells like unnatural lighting and awkward hands. Consumers report feeling duped by convincing fakes, and platforms and brands are responding. iHeartMedia introduced a guaranteed-human tagline after research showed 90% of its listeners prefer human-created media. Marketers face a delicate position amid eroding trust and growing demand for transparent, human-produced content. The prediction is that 2026 will see a strong shift toward fully human marketing.

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