Aura Vs. Slop Content Strategies

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The AI Slop Wars Are Here

I'm starting to believe the slop wars—the war waged on all of us by AI companies trying to entice us to make as much garbage as possible—is going to become the most defining thing in your marketing and what you present to fans.

Maybe you missed it, but Taylor Swift fans felt quite betrayed for using AI in her promotional videos. I've been discussing this a lot with people who hire me for consulting. This is becoming our most defining decision that shapes more marketing decisions than anything else: DO WE ENGAGE WITH SLOP? how much do we post, what goes on which accounts, and what do we choose for the artist account versus the fan accounts?

On one artist I was working with, we realized we hadn't posted on the grid in a month because nothing felt good enough—everything went on the fan account. That's bad. Especially after considering Rachel Karten’s substack “Link In Bio” about how the grid grows your followers but we were too busy having too high standards and though that maybe we need to loosen uo. We were really underusing it.

What Aura Actually Means

This is from 8Ball, Sean Monahan's Substack. His thought this week: the opposite of slop is aura.

I don't really like the word aura because it's like using the word "thing" in writing—it means too much. But what I've come to accept is that aura basically means "what I'm seeing here is exceptional."

When people see aura, they're saying, "I'm seeing something that's not average, that's not mid." This feels bigger and newer, like somebody's out ahead. Slop is over-exposure. It's doing cheap shit all the time.

The Quantity vs Quality Lever

One of the biggest concerns has always been quantity versus quality. If we're only doing quality things, we generally need more budget or time. But slop—AI creations, regenerating the same thing with a different filter—that's winning with quantity.

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