The Era of Agents Is Also the Era of AI Slop

Once your agent has an allowance, the question is what it should spend it on. Verified, validated information — because the same wave of agents that makes budgets necessary is also flooding the web with slop.

August 20, 2026 · 1 min watch · #agents #future #tiki-toki

Key takeaways

An agent allowance only matters if there is something worth buying with it.
Machine-generated content is abundant, which makes verified information scarce and therefore valuable.
An agent acting on slop — or on deliberately biased data — makes bad decisions on your behalf.
Paying for high-quality content moves from optional to unavoidable.

Transcript

Hey guys! In the era of agents, your assistants — your agents — will have some allowance: a daily or weekly budget they can use to complete tasks on your behalf. And you’ll have to trust their judgment a little bit.

But the question is: why would I pay to access some content? The reason is very simple. The era of agents is also the era of AI slop.

Pretty soon you’ll be willing to pay a lot of money to get verified, validated information — to make the right decision, the correct decision. So paying for high quality content is a no-brainer. And in order for your agents to make the right decisions, and not be intentionally biased by someone else, you will want to pay.

It’s just a matter of time. You will not be able to get away from it. So think about it.

Sources and further reading

More Articles Are Now Created by AI Than Humans — Graphite’s CommonCrawl analysis found the volume of AI-generated articles overtook human-written ones in November 2024, which is the flood this post is reacting to.
Merriam-Webster’s 2025 Word of the Year: slop defines it as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”
The AI Slop Backlash Is Actually Having an Impact — Wired on brands pulling AI-generated campaigns after audiences rejected them. The human-side counterpart to the argument here: slop already carries a cost, which is what gives verified content a price.

X-Posted: LinkedIn

Era of Agents: Your Assistant Will Ask for Allowance
Ads can't pay for the internet once agents do the browsing — micropayments will, powered by crypto and new protocols like x402. Your agent will get an allowance, and you'll have to trust it to spend your money wisely.
Era of Agents: Agent Skills Are the Apps
Agents are becoming the new execution environment — after the OS, the browser, and mobile — and the application layer is moving into agent skills. Instead of writing ad-hoc software, we encode the logic into skills that agents run when needed.
Era of Agents: Will Google Lose Their Monopoly on Search?
As search shifts from Google to agents, new players like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity finally have a shot at breaking Google's grip. Good news for the local businesses too scared to even edit their Google profile.

Key takeaways

Sources and further reading

Comments