The AI slop wave and your fundraising

I once worked at a place where a good way to get ahead was to say a lot.

To hold forth in meetings. To filibuster by talking nonstop.

To send out long, complex emails with lots of bullet points, multi-page memos. And powerpoints. Oh, the powerpoints. With paragraphs of text. And inexplicable clip art.

I feel tired just remembering it.

In that workplace, you signaled your expertise through volume of words. Sometimes, buried within the mounds of verbiage, there’d be good ideas. But the labor of staying attentive through the emptiness of the presentation was a struggle. It was so much easier to say “Good thinking. Brilliant.” And move on.

Here’s the important part: This was well before AI.

This was pure human effort.

People tend to do what they get rewarded for doing. And in that place and time, shear volume of words often got rewarded. Don’t get me wrong: There were smart people doing smart work at that company. But the level of human-produced “slop” was prodigious.

We didn’t have a name for it.

But now we do. We call it AI Slop.

It’s strikingly like some of my old coworkers. Times 1,000. And a lot faster.

That’s where we are with AI these days. Held hostage to reams of slop. You have to read it because someone sent it to you with the claim that it has value. And, now and then, there’s a good idea in there.

I don’t know whether AI is going to destroy everyone’s job or usher in a new era of prosperity for all. (It’ll probably be somewhere between those.) But I do know the volume of slop AI produces is a problem that’s going to get worse before it gets better. Just look at your new and social media feeds. Especially LinkedIn, which a tsunami of AI slop posts has made almost unreadable.

And, unfortunately, some fundraising.

Okay, human-produced fundraising has not been exactly great. AI just allows bad fundraising to propagate a lot faster.

I know I’m sounding like I’m anti-AI. I am, to an extent.

I think there are smart and useful ways to work with AI to make your fundraising more efficient. And, just maybe, more effective.

But you have to keep your eyes wide open.

And stop the slop.

That’s what I’ll be talking about for the next few Wednesdays. How to use AI in your fundraising. How to defend against the dumb things AI wants to do in your fundraising. And how to protect yourself and your messaging against the slop.

I wonder what my old workplace is like, now that AI makes churning out high-volume slop so easy. It is either a nightmare of powerpoints or they’ve changed the way you get ahead there. I hope it’s the latter.

I’ll leave you with what I think is the most important thing we all need to keep in mind about AI and fundraising: If you are bad at fundraising, AI won’t help you be better. It’ll probably make you worse. But faster.

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