The War on AI Slop is Already Here…

We’re told that AI is going to revolutionise marketing. In reality, we’re already drowning in AI-generated slop that looks and sounds the same…

Coca-Cola’s Christmas 2025 ad is a case in point. It took them forever, a Hollywood-size production team and 70,000 AI-generated clips to stitch together a final version. The budget? Colossal. The result? Cold, robotic, joyless. The ad was panned and not just by creatives. Consumers didn’t connect. It didn’t feel right.

McDonald’s tried the same trick in the Netherlands. Their fully AI-generated holiday ad was so off-key it was pulled from YouTube within days. It was eerie. Not in a surreal, postmodern way. Just… wrong.

These are billion-dollar brands with access to the best technology and creative minds in the world. And yet when they put AI in the director’s chair, they ended up with slop. Expensive slop.

But this isn’t really about ads. It’s about what Cory Doctorow calls reverse centaurs. Humans working for machines, not with machines. An Amazon driver whose eye movements are tracked by AI and whose body becomes an extension of logistics software. A radiologist told to sign off on AI decisions and take the blame when it gets it wrong. A marketer constantly rewriting the vanilla, GCSE standard copy generated by ChatGPT.

This is the dark truth no one wants to say out loud: the goal isn’t better work. The goal is cheaper work. It’s not about helping creatives or strategists do more with less. It’s about replacing them altogether, or at least trying to.

The truth is, AI can’t actually do a marketers job. But the AI hype can convince your boss that it can. That’s the valuation pump. Fire the team. Use AI instead. Pocket the profit. That’s the fantasy.

But look closely and this fantasy unravels. The outputs aren’t better. They’re worse. The small, up front savings will cost companies ten times that in brand erosion. Brands are risking customer trust - and that’s not something you recover from once it’s lost.

Don’t get more wrong, AI is good at a few things. Data analysis. Split testing. Pattern recognition. It can tell you that Subject Line B outperformed Subject Line A. It can tell you that Segment 4 is clicking more than Segment 2. It can summarise a thousand rows of ad performance data faster than an intern. That’s great. That’s useful. That’s centaur stuff, human and machine, working together.

But the moment you let AI near the soul of your brand: your story, your design, your message, you risk losing your essence. We’ve seen this across dozens of real client tests. The AI draft is always in need of a severe rewrite. AI images are average at best, uncanny at worst. Video is a visual soup of strange eyes, glossy skin and stilted pacing.

Worse, we’ve watched clients pour money into this. Money that could have been spent on better strategy, better copy, better creative. Instead, they got dragged into pouring resources into fixing something that was, ironically, meant to save them time.

So what’s the answer?

Well, it’s not zero AI. But it’s also not 100% AI. 

It’s knowing the difference between smart and stupid. Between a tool and a trap.

At Skill + Fire, we use AI, but only where it helps. We keep humans at the heart of strategy, design and messaging because those are the things that make your customers care.

The AI bubble will burst. Like crypto before it, like the metaverse before that, it’s already showing signs. But we will be left with some genuinely useful tools, summarisation, automation, transcriptions, analytics.

Until then, we’ll keep doing what we’ve always done: helping our clients grow with taste, with strategy, with intent. And if that means writing every line or placing every pixel by hand, so be it.

Because in a sea of synthetic sludge, being human matters. Style matters. Story matters.

We’re not letting the slop win.