Brands that succeed in the age of AI will be those that make trust an operating system, says Paul Armstrong

Google, Meta, OpenAI, LinkedIn, TikTok and the rest of the attention cartel are not drowning in AI slop by mistake, they’re selling the lifeboats. The only way out (to be seen) is to buy ads. Whodathunk? The flood of AI-generated content isn’t an accident or a temporary byproduct of big tech progress, it’s the logical outcome of a business model built on noise. Platform capitalism rewards chaos because it creates dependency, and they’re just thrilled to force you down the synthetic content rabbit warren, because it makes the filters that promise to organise it (their systems) more valuable.

The economics are brutally simple. In the past, platforms competed on quality of information and ease of access. Now the big platforms compete on control of curation. Every degraded search result, hallucinated summary, or repetitive video of AI-generated nonsense deepens reliance on the algorithmic filters that decide what cuts through. The slop is not a bug to fix; it is a feature that fuels demand for the next layer of monetised clarity. When everything looks the same, context becomes a premium product. The only folks this isn’t going to work well for (or so well, at least) is Amazon and Pinterest who just announced they will give users a way to limit slop.

AI slop is economic leverage as it amplifies information asymmetry between producers and platforms. Brands, investors and even governments must now pay intermediaries for access to reliable signal. In financial markets, synthetic data and bot-driven sentiment can distort price discovery. In policymaking, AI-generated........

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