The article circles around a central idea that it never fully identifies: whether AI is involved or not, all slop is made by HUMANS. Because the real cause of "slop" is that someone didn't care and published the first result they got, as if it was the final product. They didn't put in the effort to analyze what they got, improve on it and deliver a minimum quality.

And this is something that has always happened. Way earlier than current AIs we had already coined the term "shovelware" that was mostly a large quantity of sloppy software. We also had plenty of sloppy drawings at sites like DeviantArt. AI just made it way easier for slop to happen, but the ones producing slop are always people.