Most words and ideas are open source — that's the root of 'AI slop'

Language itself is essentially open source. No one owns the individual letters of an alphabet, no one owns most words, and no one even owns their own name — there are many people named Greg, many named Cole, and if two of them introduce themselves the same way, neither is plagiarizing the other. This extends to ideas: the vast majority of words, groupings of words, thoughts, and sentences are shared — not actually attributable to any one individual. That's exactly what people are picking up on when they identify 'AI slop.' What they're really identifying is commodity content. Reading something that feels AI-generated feels the way it does because it isn't attributable to any one person. Take the sentence 'the key to losing weight is eating healthy' — that's a commodity sentence. Millions of people have said that exact grouping of words, and we don't call them plagiarists. We just recognize it as shared, unoriginal language.