What Is AI Slop, and Why Is It Wearing Advertising Down?

Today more than ever, AI content is everywhere: Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and it has deeply divided the public. Especially now, there's a word that has become the buzzword of the advertising industry: slop.

What Is AI Slop?

AI slop is the sum of all that mass-produced AI content, made quickly, without review, often just to fill a slot on a profile and grab a click. And it's no longer confined to social media: it has forced its way into real advertising campaigns.

At Cannes Lions 2026, the most important event dedicated to communication, marketing and advertising, the topic dominated stages and conversations. The event's CEO, Simon Cook, spoke openly about an industry at risk of producing "mediocrity at scale." Ogilvy titled its festival programming "Slop Age." Even Arthur Sadoun, CEO of Publicis, one of the largest advertising groups in the world, released a satirical film titled "The Wrong Promises" mocking the exaggerated promises agencies themselves make about AI during pitches.

How to Spot AI Slop

The public has learned to sniff it out. The most common signs are:

• text that's too polished and uniform, sentences that seem to come out of the same mould;
• hyperrealistic images with details out of place (wrong hands, unnatural lighting, objects that make no physical sense);
• polished videos that don't actually tell a real story;
• synthetic "creators" passed off as real people;
• reviews or testimonials that don't hide the fact they don't come from a genuine experience.

A very famous case is McDonald's Netherlands: a Christmas ad generated almost entirely with AI was pulled within a few weeks, swept away by criticism. Even though the agency claimed weeks of meticulous work on the prompts, the public branded the result as unsettling and lacking continuity, between impossible physics and characters that felt off: neither the craft nor the message convinced anyone.

Why Do Companies Keep Investing in Content Like This?

AI applied to advertising isn't a total failure, it brings real advantages too, which is why no brand will stop using it. First of all, AI can cut production costs and generate dozens of variants of the same ad in a few hours, testing different messages on different audience segments. A message can be quickly adapted to different languages, markets or customer targets. Finally, AI can be used to speed up editing, translate and dub content, summarise data and make a video more accessible. The end result genuinely improves the quality of the final work, without the audience even noticing.

On the other hand, there's audience fatigue, which doesn't come from the technology itself, but from how it's used: filling the feed with content that "sounds good" but says nothing. Hyperbolic headlines, a tone that shifts from one post to the next, zero review before publishing: it's an own goal a company can score against itself.

And this fatigue isn't just about AI slop, it's tangled up with a broader saturation of commercial communication: email, push notifications, SMS, retargeting, social ads, in-app messages. Users don't perceive these channels as separate compartments, but as a single, continuous pressure from brands.

Optimove's 2026 Marketing Fatigue Report notes that people don't reward brands that communicate less, but those that communicate more relevantly: 89% of consumers buy after a relevant offer, versus 65% after a generic one. Relevance matters more than frequency. The problem isn't how much advertising we see, but how much of it actually concerns us.

So the real problem isn't AI slop, it's how it's used. Now more than ever, the public is looking for advertising that communicates real value and knows how to build a dialogue, something this kind of content doesn't do, since AI often doesn't speak to a real interlocutor, but simply replicates predefined patterns.

Does Advertising Really Need to Keep Evolving?

Advertising has always been a trade that reinvents itself almost continuously out of necessity: radio, television, the internet, social media, every technological leap has forced a change in language. Speaking to today's public is very different from speaking to the public of the 2000s or the 1980s. In this sense, evolving has never been optional: channels and audience behaviour change, and whoever communicates has to follow that movement or become invisible.

But there's a difference between the evolution of language and the evolution of production technique. The first kind of evolution is almost always necessary: adapting to how people talk, watch, jump from one piece of content to the next. The second kind, producing more, faster, with fewer people involved, isn't necessarily what serves the audience. It often just serves to cut costs, and the audience perceives it as a step backward, not progress.

The Cannes Lions 2026 case makes this clear: the industry itself had to backpedal, requiring every entry to be personally guaranteed by whoever signs it, precisely to rein in the race toward unchecked automated production. It's a sign that the word "innovation" is no longer enough to justify any production choice.

Perhaps the right question isn't "do we always have to evolve?" but "what, exactly, do we need to evolve?". How we tell a story, the channel we distribute it on, the moment it reaches people: yes, that needs constant updating, because the audience changes. But the idea that every ad has to be produced faster and cheaper than the year before, that one, no: it isn't evolution, it's just a shortcut. And shortcuts, once the audience notices them (and it notices more and more), get paid for in lost trust.

The real problem is that now more than ever we're bombarded with AI-generated stock images and text written, or dialogue performed, with ChatGPT's classic flat tone. In this scenario, the audience's attention shifts toward rarity, toward a human point of view, toward the creative flaw, toward the simple tone of voice of a real actor or voice performer. The public doesn't want a perfect monologue generated by a machine; it wants a dialogue with a brand that shows it understands its real problems.

AI isn't the absolute enemy. If a copywriter uses AI to brainstorm and then puts in the work to build a deep campaign, AI becomes a value multiplier. The problem arises when AI is used as a lazy shortcut to replace critical thinking.

AI in advertising works when it stays a tool in service of an idea, not when it becomes the idea itself. The audience of 2026 isn't hostile to technology: it's hostile to mediocrity disguised as innovation. And perhaps the real evolutionary leap advertising needs isn't technical, but methodological: going back to asking who you're communicating for, before asking which tool to use.

The same principle applies to software. A website or web app built in a hurry, with unreviewed generated code and no one willing to put their name on it, is the slop of our own trade: it works until someone looks under the hood. At M's Works, code stays a human responsibility. AI is a tool we use, not a substitute for critical thinking.