There’s a recognizable pattern to AI slop. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
The “It’s not just X, it’s Y” sentence structure used over and over. The smooth, generic, vaguely helpful tone that could have been written about literally anything. The five-bullet structure where every bullet starts with a strong verb. The “Let me break this down for you” before something that didn’t ever need to be broken down.
It’s competent. But it’s also forgettable. And I’m so done reading it.
The thing that’s most missing from AI slop though, is any kind of taste or opinion. As a result, it really doesn’t do anything. Reading it is a waste of time. And people hate it.
But I’m convinced people don’t actually dislike AI itself. They hate the low-quality content it generates that isn’t worth their time or attention. And the truth is, AI didn’t invent low-quality content. It just made flooding the internet with it incredibly easy. And now we’re drowning in it.
But underneath what I’m calling “the slop tide” is something I find fascinating.
AI Didn’t Kill Creative Work
Back in 2022, there was a narrative circulating that ChatGPT was going to replace all knowledge work. Writers, marketers, researchers, designers — all of their jobs were on the chopping block. Your years of building a Second Brain? A quaint reminder of simpler times. Your Obsidian vault? An ancient relic of the way humans used to think.
But you already know that’s not what happened. AI didn’t replace knowledge work. But it did fundamentally change it.
It commoditized much of the labor parts of knowledge work (and PKM). The manual capture and transcription of notes, the organizing of files into folders so you can find things later, the summarization of documents into a few important bullet points — all the work that used to help differentiate the good knowledge workers from the average ones.
Taking good meeting notes used to be a valuable skill. Now, anyone can use an app to transcribe and summarize a Zoom call, then write those notes directly into a shared workspace. Services like Blinkist used to offer 15-minute summaries of popular books. Now you can just ask AI for a detailed summary of any published work.
The trick is to know where to leverage the AI and where to insert the humanity. Writing any blog post used to be hard, laborious work. Now, anyone can draft a blog post in 30 seconds.
But they’re not the same. And people can tell.
Good creative work has (and always will have) a certain degree of humanity the robots can’t replace.
Here’s what didn’t get commoditized: taste and voice. The discernment to know what’s worth paying attention to can’t be automated by predicting the next thing in the pattern. That’s why when a good creator says something, it sounds like them and not the algorithmic average. The judgment to know what’s true, useful, beautiful, and real increases the quality of the output.
These were always the things we appreciated about good creative work. We just couldn’t see it clearly when the labor was hard. When drafting took eight hours, it was easy to mistake the labor for the value.
Now that drafting takes eight seconds, we can see what was actually doing the work the whole time — and it was never the typing of the text.
Taste and Voice Can’t Be Generated
AI tools all tend toward the average. It’s what they are designed to do. Every generation of text is a sophisticated remix of what’s already been written. That’s why, after a while, everything starts to sound the same — not because AI is bad, but because AI is good at producing the median.
And the median is, by definition, average.
If you want to do distinctive work in the AI era, you can’t get it from using the same tools everyone else is using in the same ways everyone else is using them. The slop tide is what you get when people delegate the parts of the creative process that should have stayed human.
But taste and voice can’t be downloaded. They can’t be prompted into existence. They can’t be generated by an LLM. They have to be developed over months and years, with a specific kind of practice. The practice of noticing what catches your attention. The practice of curating what’s useful and cutting the rest. The practice of figuring out how things connect and articulating for yourself why that matters. The practice of forming opinions, refining them, and publishing them, recognizing where you were wrong and refining them again.
This is the practice of PKM. It’s a thinking practice. It’s the slow, deliberate work of becoming a person who notices things, connects them, and turns them into something human that has your personal fingerprints all over it.
Two creators using the same AI tools will produce wildly different work. The difference isn’t the tools. It’s everything they brought with them — the reading they’ve done, the notes they’ve kept, the connections they’ve made, the voice they’ve honed, the judgment they’ve sharpened by being wrong a hundred times in public.
But if you have voice & taste, then AI can be an amplifier. And amplifiers amplify whatever you connect to them. If you connect that amplifier to a clear, distinct, well-developed voice, you get something the world hasn’t heard before.
Your PKM System is the Darkroom
If you’ve been running a PKM practice for years, you’ve been doing something that almost nobody else does anymore. You’ve been building a record of what catches your attention. You’ve been articulating your reactions to things. You’ve been making connections that aren’t obvious to anyone but you.
Five years ago, this looked like a productivity hack. Three years ago, it looked like an obsession. Today, it looks like the thing that’s about to matter more than it has in a generation.
Think of your vault like a photographer’s darkroom. The notes you’ve captured are the negatives — raw exposures of the moments that caught your attention. The final image isn’t in the negative yet. It has to be developed slowly, in private, through patience and process. That’s the application of taste and voice. And the skill of the photographer is what makes the difference between a flat print and one that stops you in your tracks.
AI is one of the tools in the darkroom. Not the camera. Not the negative. More like a really good enlarger that lets you see what’s been there the whole time — sometimes in ways you couldn’t see on your own.
When you point AI at your captured material instead of at a blank page, things start to happen. It surfaces that thing you wrote three years ago that directly answers the question you’re wrestling with this week. It finds the through-line across forty notes you didn’t realize were saying the same thing. It pressure-tests your draft against opinions you’ve evolved out of. It helps you see connections in your own thinking that you couldn’t see yourself because you were too close to them.
This is connection, not generation. And connection — using AI to amplify what you’ve already developed — is where the real leverage lives.
Generation is what everyone else is doing with AI. Connection is what almost nobody is doing.
Why? Because almost no one has the developed material to make it worth doing.
That developed material doesn’t appear by accident. It comes from running a practice — the one I teach is called The Creativity Flywheel:
- Capture what resonates
- Curate what’s useful
- Connect things together
- Cultivate the seeds
- Create something new & original
Every stage involves an intentional choice. Every choice sharpens the discernment muscle that makes your work unmistakably yours. The Flywheel isn’t just a productivity framework — it’s the practice that builds taste. It’s what makes AI a partner in the work rather than a substitute for it.
The Creative Tastemaker: A Working Definition
A Creative Tastemaker isn’t a fashion influencer or a lifestyle curator. Those words have been spoken for. A Creative Tastemaker is someone who has developed taste, voice, and judgment through deliberate practice — and who uses AI to amplify those developed qualities rather than replace them. The result isn’t more output. It’s distinctive output. Work that rises above the slop tide because it’s grounded in something AI can’t generate: an opinionated person who has practiced becoming themselves.
Their capture is selective. Their curation is opinionated. Their connections surface insights nobody else would have made. Their cultivation sharpens ideas rather than smoothing them. And their creation produces work that’s unmistakably them — even, especially, when AI is involved in the making.
This is the identity I think a lot of us are quietly building toward. It’s what’s been happening in the PKM community for years, even before the current AI tools raised the stakes. We’re the people who took notes when nobody required us to. Who developed opinions in public. Who built systems for thinking rather than just systems for producing. Who chose to invest in something that didn’t have an obvious payoff until — suddenly — it had the only payoff that mattered.
We are the Creative Tastemakers.
The future of creative work belongs to people who developed taste in the years before they had to, versus everyone else who’s trying to mask the lack of it through efficiency.
What This Means for Your PKM Practice
Your PKM practice has been building taste this whole time. We just have a clearer view now of why it mattered. And from here, four things shift.
The first is what you capture. Most people capture content — the article, the highlight, the screenshot. But the content isn’t the gold. The reaction is. The article will still exist next week. Your reaction to it won’t, unless you catch it right now. That’s the raw material you need to develop your taste in the age of AI.
The second is what you point AI at. A blank page produces the median. Your years of captured reactions and half-formed opinions produce something only you could have made. When you point AI at your notes and ideas, it can help you strengthen your connections and amplify your voice as a Creative Tastemaker.
The third is treating your voice as the asset. Voice isn’t something you find once and keep forever — it erodes, especially when you’re using tools optimized to smooth everything toward the average.
AI can produce something competent in thirty seconds, but competence isn’t the goal. Being unmistakable is.
The fourth is how you interact with AI. When you use AI for connection instead of generation, it becomes a creative partner. It’s not doing the thinking for you, but it’s not just a robot intern either. It helps you do the harder version of the work, not the easier one. A creative partner pushes back when you’re hiding. It points out where you’re being lazy. It surfaces the questions you didn’t want to ask. AI doing the work for you is the slop tide. AI doing the work with you is the Creative Tastemaker.
The Bottom Line: Taste is the New Moat
AI didn’t kill creative work. It just made taste the moat.
For most of the internet’s history, taste was something you discovered through trial and error. Now it’s the only thing that can’t be commoditized. Your vault isn’t a productivity hack. It’s the substrate that determines what AI can actually do for you. Your practice isn’t a hobby. It’s the darkroom where the qualities that are about to matter most get developed.
If you’ve been quietly building this for years, you’re not behind. You’re early. The slop tide is making your work more visible, not less.
The Creative Tastemaker isn’t an aspirational future identity. It’s who you’ve been becoming all along.
And now is the time to own it.
