The guide · AI slop

AI slop is a brand problem, not an AI problem

By Mary-Anne Da'Marzo, The Marketing Engineer · 19 October 2026 · Facts checked 19 October 2026 · 12 minute read

Everywhere I look right now, people are saying the same thing. Personal brand is the future. Humans are going to win. And in the same breath, they're using AI to churn out content that sounds exactly like the next person's.

I've been on both sides of this. So this guide started the way my best stuff always starts... as a voice note. Thirteen minutes of me talking about what I actually think. Everything below came from that.

Everyone's calling it slop

Two years ago, hardly anyone in the UK searched for "AI slop". Now more than 9,000 people a month do. That's about 11 times as many in two years.

Merriam-Webster even made "slop" its 2025 Word of the Year, for low quality content "produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence".

So now everyone's picking a side. It's AI slop, or you're anti-AI. I don't sit on either.

"It's not AI slop or anti-AI. It's anti-AI cloning and copying."Mary-Anne Da'Marzo, voice note, October 2026

How slop actually gets made

To create with AI, the AI goes and finds the authority: the most searched, highest ranking content on that topic. Then it merges all of it together, with a little bit of insight... if the person goes that far.

What never makes it in is the good stuff. Someone's unique take. Their unique experience. What they see as an operator, day to day, in the channel they actually work in.

And now there's a whole wave of tools asking you to scan the internet for the most viral topics and the most viral script formats. So everyone copies everyone else.

What does that mean for thought leadership? For creators? Where's your actual opinion, your identity?

It's gone.

Personal brand is personal insight

Everybody's going around copying everybody. Finding the top creators and mimicking their voice. That isn't personal brand.

I think every creator needs to slow down a little bit. Personal brand is personal insight. It's something you see from your perspective that others can't, because they don't have your experience. That's what authenticity actually means, and all the other words everyone rolls around.

Think like an artist

Artists don't go around copying each other's paintings. They find their own style. Something inspires them about the way another artist uses the paintbrush... and they take it on and do something better with it.

Personal brand works the same way. It's interpretation. It's perception. It comes from experience and from personal stories. Those are the things that make a personal brand a personal brand.

"If personal brand is going to be about churning out the same content that's on the internet in different ways, then I think we all need to get a life and figure out what we're doing."Mary-Anne Da'Marzo

Same goes for a business. The power of a brand is its identity: who you are, how you think, and why people buy from you. If you never wrote that down, your AI has nothing to work with except everybody else's content.

Every post that broke out was original thought

I set up my social channels in 2020. All I did back then was open my phone and talk about something I'd done that day, something new I'd learnt, or a framework we follow in the agency. Then I posted it.

The edit wasn't great. I did it on my phone. I didn't mine hooks or write a script. It was my process, my way, shared across the internet... and it went SO viral.

Views and saves from my own TikTok and LinkedIn posts, checked 19 October 2026.

Every single time my content has broken out, it was something I thought, not something I found. Back then, before I posted anything, I'd ask myself one question: "Can my unique perspective add something fresh to the conversation?" I still ask it.

The copycats, and the lane I didn't stay in

As my content grew, I was known as a creator in the SEO space. Then SEO just wasn't enough for me. I wanted to learn more, so I learnt every part of a marketing plan for a business. I'm a control freak, and I want to own the number. Owning the number means owning every channel that feeds it.

Meanwhile, creators in narrower niches started copying my content word for word. Some of them went viral with it and grew faster than me. And I thought, "Ah, I've made a mistake here. I should have stayed in my lane."

But it didn't feel right. I didn't know it then, but I was building to this. SEO never sits on its own. The website, the landing pages, the ads that are running, the PR: every channel connects. Every word, every photo, every graphic, every video, every sound a brand puts out on any given day changes how its channels report.

I fell into my own trap

And look, I got on the hype too.

As I started to scale my personal brand, I brought on a team to help me make content. We tried to get AI to copy my tone of voice. The posts became systemised. They followed a process. And it took the human out of them.

You can see it on my LinkedIn. The times I just show up, as me, and type out my thoughts? That content lands. It resonates, because I'm sharing an independent thought that you haven't read anywhere else. Or one that something else inspired, where I've got a different take.

The whole internet is talking about how to speed up personal brands and thought leadership right now. But everyone's speeding up the wrong things.

Speed up the systems behind you, never the thinking.

Systemise the right parts

Systemise the execution. How your idea shows up across your website and your socials, and how it all connects. The button clicking, the designing, the scheduling. AI can do a pretty good job of all of that.

Don't systemise your take. Your voice. The independent part that makes it you. Otherwise we're building a world of clones, where everybody talks about the same thing and nobody can trust anything.

"You define the rules. You define what gets picked up. You are the tastemaker. That's what travels."Mary-Anne Da'Marzo

One voice note, everything else

These days, I just voice note into my phone, or wherever's easiest at the time. Three to ten minutes of what I believe about a market. Then the brain behind me takes it from there.

It takes that first spark, the thought leadership, and packages it up for every place I share, in the way I share: carousels, newsletters, frameworks, guides. None of it comes from scraping the internet for whatever's going viral.

This guide is the proof. It started as that voice note. And if you don't believe me, look across my site. Go through every word. Those words came from my voice notes.

It's how I run three very distinct places on the internet now: Marketing Engineers, where you learn to do it yourself; Firebelly, where we build it for brands; and my personal brand.

Same rule if you sell products

Learning every channel taught me how much of this connects. I know that for SEO you need Search Console and Merchant Center, a product catalogue that's right, and products grouped properly. I also know that if you run GMV Max campaigns on TikTok Shop, the content your affiliate creators make is what drives them.

Those affiliate armies drive a business's growth. But you can't support them if you haven't defined your brand brain first. Who you are, who you sell to and why they buy.

When you have, you can reach deep, deep avatar levels: the real people who buy, in their own words. And why they really buy.

So yes, you can make everything with AI behind you, as a creator, a business owner or a brand. But you set the rules. If you sell products, start with the B.R.A.I.N.™ for e-commerce brands.

Your filter is the thought leadership

This is my whole ethos on tone deaf or tone dialled. I know what's going on in my industry because every day I read a digest of the news from the sources I trust.

But the news isn't the value. The value I give people is my original take on it.

"Media is there to share a story, but my filter on that story is the thing that makes me a thought leader."Mary-Anne Da'Marzo

So if you want to become a leading creator in any space, any niche, whatever it is you sell, the power of the brand is you. Your identity. Your thoughts. A hook library that copies everybody else's content can't give you that.

If you're still learning, say so

If you don't know something yet, be open about it. Share that you're on the journey of learning. Say you're learning to be an SEO, or learning to be a paid media manager.

If you DO know, and you have deep knowledge, you shouldn't be copying everybody else. Pull from your own brain. I'm talking human brain, not AI brain. Your insights, what matters to you, what you think. That's what thought leadership is.

What I won't do is put out content that shows authority without the receipts to deliver on it. In a world of AI slop, that just adds more of what nobody needs.

Check it before it goes out

Please stop using AI in open chat mode to generate your content. Get clear on who you are, who you're speaking to, and what value you bring for them. Then run every piece through this.

We have to take 17 steps back to take 1,000 forward. Less Open Chat Mode, more Closed Brand Mode.

AI slop: your questions