There's a business model inside the AI workslop panic.

I want you to see it.

A few days ago, I posted about workslop on LinkedIn.

Workslp is the term for AI output that skipped the human.

Generated fast, looks approximately right, worth nothing. The stuff you can feel from three sentences in. The kind of content that reads like a language model impersonating a person.

…and the LinkedIn gurus and trolls have shown up to shame all of us who use AI to create content.

I’ve seen these “Gurus” go so far as to screenshot and teardown people's posts to ridicule them for using AI.

You know the type. Big followings. Lots of content about content.

Courses on building your authentic brand. A newsletter about why AI will never replace real human creativity.

They've been running this play for years, and I finally understand why.

It's not a stance. It's a business model.

Every person who figures out AI-assisted creation is a person who stops paying them for theirs. Every team that builds internal AI workflows is a team that doesn't hire their agency. Every founder who learns to create with AI is a founder who doesn't need the $3,000 course on finding your authentic voice.

The shame isn't organic. It's strategic.

They find a post with one or two detectable AI tells, screenshot the worst paragraph, and post it as evidence of "the epidemic." They don't teach you how to fix it. They need you afraid enough to keep watching.

They're not wrong about the problem.

AI slop is real. It's everywhere. It's making the internet worse. I have ~200 documented patterns cataloged that prove it.

These Gurus are weaponizing the problem for their own selfish improvement.

Every post you don't publish because you're afraid of the slop police is a post that keeps them relevant. Every tool you don't pick up because some influencer said "authentic creators don't use AI" is a skill gap that keeps you paying them for theirs.

Here's what the playbook looks like in practice: they find an AI-assisted piece with one or two detectable tells, screenshot the worst paragraph, post it as an example of "the AI slop epidemic," and collect 50,000 impressions off your mistake.

They don't teach you how to fix it. They just need you afraid enough to keep watching.

They are protecting their business model, not your standards.

I spent four years building an AI-assisted insurance company before anyone was calling it that…

Here’s what I learned: neither the people who acquired me, nor the insurance industry as a whole, has yet figured out… the people who win take action while things are still messy.

They don’t wait for permission from some Guru.

They don’t follow best practices as gospel.

They live by the same code that I do…

FAFO (F*** around and find out).

This is the single most important era in history to experiment with AI creation. Not to read about it. Not to follow the newsletter about what the newsletter about AI says about AI. Not to wait for an influencer to hand you permission.

To make things. Put them out. See what happens.

You're going to make workslop. I've made workslop. Genuinely embarrassing stuff, sent anyway. The goal isn't to skip that phase.

The goal is to move through it faster than the person who never started because they were afraid of what someone in the comments would say.

That gap, between the person moving and the person watching, is the only one that matters.

Here's what I did instead of arguing with the slop-shamers.

I built something for one of my clients (and I’m not sharing it with you).

I spent an afternoon pair-programming with Claude. Not an app. Not a product I'm selling. A personal writing filter for my own workflow.

I call it antipatterns.

It's a catalog of about 200 workslop patterns that make text read as a language model wrote it, rather than as a human wrote it. Organized into 15 categories.

The clichéd vocabulary everyone can spot from across the room now. The false antithesis rhythm ("It's not X, it's Y"). The dramatic colons. The chirpy closers. The stat-flavored vagueness. The bolded bullet lead-ins.

Each pattern has a tier.

The skill fires automatically when I draft anything. Scans the output, flags the tells, rewrites the offending sections, runs a voice drift check to make sure the cleanup didn't sand down what makes my writing mine.

You can add this skill to Claude Code, Gemini, OpenAI, Manu AI…whatever tool you use.

"In today's fast-paced world, AI is transforming the insurance landscape. It's not just a technology shift, it's a complete paradigm shift. Furthermore, agents who fail to leverage these tools will be left behind."

"AI is changing how insurance gets sold. Agents who don't pick up the tools now are going to lose accounts to the ones who did."

You feel that.

I put the whole thing on GitHub. Free. MIT-licensed.

→ github.com/ryanhanley13/antipatterns

───

It's skill…

Skill requires reps. Reps require putting things into the world before they're perfect. The people trying to shame you out of that process have a financial interest in you staying stuck.

The slop police aren't watching to help you. They're watching to clip you.

The FAFO era is here. The only question is whether you're in it.

This is the way.

Hanley.

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P.S. The FAFO era applies to your whole life, not just your content. My Easy Mode Coaching Program is for high achievers who are done wasting the years that matter most on the wrong problems. Reply to this email to learn more.

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