The headache started before I even opened the laptop. It was that dull, thumping rhythm behind the eyes that usually signals bad weather or bad news. Today, it was the latter. I was staring at a glowing screen in a dim room, the blinds drawn tight against the offensive cheerfulness of the morning sun, reading about a man named Jacob Navok.
Jacob is a suit. A CEO. The kind of guy who probably uses words like “synergy” and “paradigm shift” without the decency to blush. And Jacob has decided to declare war on the concept of taste.
According to this genius, the next generation of human beings—Gen Z, the poor bastards inheriting the burning wreckage we’re leaving behind—doesn’t just tolerate mediocrity. No, apparently, they crave it. They lust for it.
“Gen Z loves AI slop,” he says.
I read it twice. Then I lit a cigarette, the smoke curling up into the stale air of my apartment, trying to obscure the screen. It didn’t help. The words were still there, accusing an entire demographic of having the discerning palate of a dung beetle.
Navok went on to quote—and I swear on the last bottle of scotch in my cupboard I am not making this up—lines from The Dark Knight Rises. He compared Gen Z to Bane. “You merely adopted the slop, I was born in it.”
It takes a special kind of disconnect to look at a generation raised on algorithms, microtransactions, and 15-second dopamine hits, and conclude that what they really want is more garbage. It’s like looking at a man starving in a desert, drinking his own sweat to survive, and saying, “Look at him! He loves the salty taste of desperation! Let’s bottle it and sell it back to him.”
The evidence for this bold claim? A game called “Steal a Brainrot.”
You can’t make this stuff up. The simulation is glitching. We are living in a satire written by a depressed clown. “Steal a Brainrot” is a game on Roblox that hit 25 million concurrent players. It is, by all accounts, a fever dream of AI-generated assets, meaningless noise, and the digital equivalent of jingling keys in front of a toddler.
Because 25 million kids logged into a free platform to run around in a chaotic mess, the suits have decided that high-art is dead and the future is “slop.”
I needed a drink. The coffee wasn’t cutting it, and the sheer absurdity of the logic required a solvent. I poured three fingers of cheap bourbon into a glass that hasn’t seen soap since Tuesday. The burn going down was the only honest thing I’d felt all morning.
Here’s the thing about “slop.” It’s a perfect word. It implies a lack of form, a lack of intent. It’s what you feed pigs. It’s the leftovers, the gristle, the stuff that isn’t good enough for the main table. And now, we have executives salivating over the idea of serving it to us on a silver platter and charging seventy bucks for the privilege.
The argument is painfully, stupidly simple: If the numbers go up, the product must be good. It’s the logic of a cancer cell. Growth for the sake of growth.
Navok dismisses the backlash against AI in gaming as “emotion rather than logic.” That’s suit-speak for “stop having feelings, you cattle, and consume the product.” He claims that consumers generally “do not care.”
But see, that’s the trick. There’s a difference between “not caring” and “having no choice.” There’s a difference between buying a burger from a fast-food joint at 2 a.m. because you’re drunk and it’s open, and claiming that the burger is the pinnacle of culinary achievement.
We’ve seen the backlash. Look at Arc Raiders. The developers thought they could sneak in AI voices—replacing human actors with ghostly, soulless synthesis—and the crowd turned on them. Why? because we can hear the emptiness. Humans are wired to detect the uncanny. We know when a voice has no breath behind it, no heartbeat, no lifetime of pain and joy coloring the vowels.
Or look at Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. They churned out some artwork that looked suspiciously like they fed a Studio Ghibli poster into a woodchipper and glued the pieces back together with an algorithm. People noticed. People got angry.
Ubisoft tried it with Anno 117. They got caught. They backpedaled.
But the suits, they don’t see the anger. They see the bottom line. They see that generating a character portrait with Midjourney costs a fraction of a cent, while hiring an artist costs a living wage. They do the math, they pour another glass of expensive wine in their corner offices, and they tell themselves that the screaming mob outside is just “emotional.”
“The tip of the spear,” Navok calls it. He says studios are using AI for concept art, for code, for everything. He’s right about that. They are. But he’s wrong about why.
They aren’t doing it to make games better. They’re doing it to make games cheaper.
I took another drag, watching the ash grow long and precarious. It’s the same old song. I’ve seen it in every industry I’ve ever stumbled through. Management wants to cut the human out of the loop because humans are messy. Humans get sick. Humans get depressed. Humans have hangovers. Humans demand respect.
An algorithm doesn’t need a bathroom break. It doesn’t need health insurance. It just spits out content. Endless, gray, soulless content.
And that’s what kills me about this “Gen Z loves slop” narrative. It’s victim blaming. It’s looking at a generation that has been force-fed algorithmic content since they were in diapers and blaming them for the diet.
One user on the internet—a place usually reserved for the worst takes imaginable—actually made sense. They said comparing a Roblox game to a premium title on Steam is like comparing cars and bicycles.
I’d go further. It’s like comparing a masterpiece painting to a stain on the wall. Sure, I can stare at the stain for twenty minutes if I’m bored enough, but that doesn’t mean I want to hang it in the Louvre.
“Steal a Brainrot” isn’t a statement of artistic preference. It’s digital loitering. It’s a place to hang out. It’s the mall food court of the internet. Just because millions of kids are eating Sbarro doesn’t mean they wouldn’t prefer a real pizza if you gave them one.
But the executives, guys like Andrew Wilson over at Electronic Arts, they’re all in. Wilson is talking about “richer colors” and “more brilliant worlds.”
Richer colors? Give me a break. You’re talking about a machine that hallucinates extra fingers and can’t figure out how light reflects off a human eye. You’re talking about a statistical probability generator that scrapes the collective creativity of the human race, chews it up, and vomits out a blurry approximation.
They talk about “democratizing creativity,” which is usually code for “firing the professionals.”
The kicker is that they think we won’t notice. They think the “slop” will become the new normal. And maybe they’re right. That’s the terrifying part. If you serve people garbage long enough, they forget what food tastes like. If you fill the world with AI-generated noise, eventually the silence of a real human moment feels awkward.
There is a glimmer of hope, though. A small one, flickering like a lighter in a hurricane.
John Buckley, the CEO of Pocketpair. He came out and said they don’t “believe in” AI-generated games. He said if you’re into AI or NFTs or Web3—all the buzzword scams of the last five years—they aren’t the partner for you.
It’s sad that “we prefer to make things ourselves” is now a radical stance. It’s sad that “we employ humans” is a unique selling point. But here we are.
I drained the glass. The whiskey settled in my stomach, warm and heavy.
The problem isn’t the technology. Technology is just a hammer. You can build a house with it, or you can bash someone’s skull in. The problem is who is holding the hammer.
Right now, the hammer is being held by people who look at a chart, see a line going up, and decide that the soul of the medium is an acceptable casualty. They see “Steal a Brainrot” and think they’ve found the Holy Grail.
They want a world where content is infinite, instant, and worthless. They want a world where you don’t have to pay a writer to bleed onto the page, or an artist to dream. They want a button they can press that turns electricity into money.
And if the product is slop? Well, if they control the supply, we’ll have to eat it eventually.
But I don’t buy the fatalism. I don’t buy that Gen Z or anyone else loves the slop. I think they’re just bored. I think they’re lonely. I think they’re looking for anything to distract them from the fact that the world is melting.
When a real game comes out—something made with passion, with intent, with human fingerprints all over its messy, beautiful code—people show up. They still buy Elden Ring. They still play Baldur’s Gate. They still clamor for art that makes them feel something other than a mild, narcotized buzz.
The suits are betting against humanity. They’re betting that we are just consumption machines, empty vessels waiting to be filled with whatever gray paste they pump through the pipes.
Maybe they’re right. Maybe we are doomed to drown in a sea of AI-generated brainrot, clapping our hands like seals as the algorithms suggest the next video, the next game, the next distraction.
But as for me, I’m going to keep looking for the cracks in the pavement. I’m going to keep looking for the stuff that looks like it was made by a person who was tired, or angry, or in love. I’m going to keep drinking this cheap bourbon, because at least I know it was made by fermenting grain and not by a predictive text model guessing what whiskey is supposed to taste like.
Navok says the consumers don’t care. He says logical complaints are just emotional noise.
He’s wrong. We care. We’re just tired. And there’s only so much slop you can shovel before the pigs start looking at the farmer and wondering if he tastes any better.
The bottle is looking a little light. The screen is still glowing. The headache is still there. But the words are down.
Tomorrow, there will be more news. More hype. More executives telling us that the sky is green and that water is dry. But for now, I’m done. The slop can wait. I’ve got a date with a headache and a half-pack of smokes.