No, I Don’t Want to Write For Your AI Slop Blog

In the last few weeks, several blogs have invited me to become a contributor. My assumption is that I’ve appeared on their radar because of some recent Opus posts that have done relatively well on search engines, like my lament for Philip Yancey’s affair and my guide to removing AI from your Gmail inbox.

To be clear, I have no real interest in writing for other blogs. Between Opus and Christ and Pop Culture, my blogging time is pretty well accounted for these days. Still, it was flattering to be asked. Until I took a closer look at the blogs that sent me those invitations, that is.

For starters, the blogs contacting me have little-to-nothing to do with what I typically write about (e.g., music, movies, pop culture). Instead, they focus on topics like cooking, beauty, lifestyle, and skincare. No offense to those who do blog about such topics, but they’re nowhere near my wheelhouse. So why would those blogs reach out to me? Have they spent any time reading Opus? Or did they just see my posts popping up on search engines and assume I could achieve similar success for them regardless of the topic?

But that’s not the truly questionable aspect of these invitations. The more I looked at these blogs, the more certain I became that they’re little more than AI slophouses trying to achieve an air of legitimacy — and increase their chances of getting traffic and ad money — by convincing human bloggers to join them. (Note: I’m not linking to the blogs in question simply because I don’t want to drive any more traffic to them. Sadly, it’s all too easy to find AI-generated blogging and journalism these days.)

So why do I suspect these blogs are AI slophouses? Here are several red flags:

1. Their authors (probably) aren’t real people. Set aside the fact that the blogs’ authors tend to have really generic names. Their author avatars are clearly AI-generated, which is easy enough to tell by right-clicking on them and selecting “Open Image in New Tab.” The avatars’ filenames often include segments like “medium-shot-of-a-38-year-old” and “photo-of-a-black-woman-with-curly-hair,” which means you’re likely looking at the result of an AI prompt. (Note to site owners: This is just really lazy and insulting. You shouldn’t be using AI-generated avatars in the first place, but if you do, at least change the filenames to look somewhat realistic.)
2. Their content is overly broad. I understand casting a wide net to attract as many readers as possible, and am occasionally guilty of it myself. But if you call yourself a recipe blog, then why post about family budgeting hacks and bed frames? Why post about sprinkler systems and heat pumps on an event planning blog? How does it boost your human audience’s confidence when they see that you’ll write about anything and everything, even topics that have nothing whatsoever to do with your supposed focus? If one of my favorite music blogs suddenly began posting about, say, estate planning or thermostats, I’d assume they were under new management who didn’t really care about music anymore, and I’d stop reading them.
3. They churn out content. This might seem a little hypocritical seeing as how I try to average at least a post/day on Opus. But when a site churns out 80 – 90 posts a month on all manner of topics (see #2), the only way to achieve that is through AI and/or an army of freelancers most likely writing and editing for a pittance — neither of which guarantee high-quality, insightful, or sustainable writing. Multiple tools exist for detecting AI-generated text, and in my tests, the blogs in question are almost certainly using AI-generated text that a human editor then tried to smooth over, “tried” being the operative word there.
4. They have no history. One blog that contacted me claimed to have been around for 15+ years. However, the oldest posts that I could find only dated back to July 2025, which is immediately suspicious. (This is pretty easy to determine if the blog runs on WordPress, which is the case for most blogs. WordPress uses a specific format for date archive URLs that can be used to easily traverse the blog’s archives and see how far back they go.) Since blogs that have been around for awhile naturally gain a sense of authority and trustworthiness, this seems like a pretty cheap attempt to claim authority they don’t actually have.
5. They claim non-existent social proof. “Social proof” is a marketing term for the legitimacy that a site gains from being referenced by other sites. When you go to a site and see an “As seen on” section with logos of TV networks, news programs, and publications, that’s social proof intended to make you think the site’s legit. After all, if Good Morning America and Fox Business are talking about the site, then they must be doing something right. Don’t take them at their word, though. It’s trivial to download a bunch of logos and slap them on a homepage. If you can’t find any actual content on the site describing when and where they were featured on those networks, news programs, etc., then you have no reason to believe them.

To be clear, this is a far bigger issue than my ego and blogging career, or whether or not I can get published on other sites. (For the record, I highly doubt that I’m the only blogger who receives these sorts of writing offers.) As AI slop continues to spread and infect the internet, it’s going to become that much harder to sift through the muck and find content written by actual human beings, be it recipes and beauty tips, music and movie reviews, or more vitally, coverage of important news and events. (On a related note, here’s my AI policy for Opus.)

If we don’t want to drown in the slop but instead, regain control over our online experiences, then it’s incumbent upon us to learn how to detect AI-generated content that’s published, not to inform, educate, or even entertain, but rather, to acquire clicks, views, and profits.