Keep reading to discover my 5 easy steps to turn your free time into $2000/month with AI!

Sound familiar? If you've done any reading on Reddit, Medium or Substack lately, you may have seen some version of this headline.

Create a faceless YouTube channel, Launch a digital product, Use AI to launch an online course, Build your first app with Claude.

AI is the new "get rich quick scheme".

I want to be clear, I'm not against AI and I'm not against any of the tactics for making money I listed above. In my last post, I talked about how AI was impacting my career and my identity as a software engineer. Now I'd like to change focus to how I'm perceiving AI as a consumer, and as a consumer, I'm disappointed, but maybe not for the reason you think.

What I'm seeing

AI slop refers to low-quality, repetitive, or meaningless digital content (text, images, video, or audio) generated rapidly by AI tools with little to no human oversight

The term AI slop went mainstream in May of 2024. Now, there is no shortage of images, videos, stories and apps that fit this category. It's not just annoying, it's disheartening.

I've had dreams of developing apps for years, but lately, I feel discouraged. There are a seemingly limitless supply of new apps being developed. Even if they aren't highly polished and would fit in the "slop" category, why should I even bother trying? There seem to be an infinite number of replica apps and new ones popping up constantly. If I build something, won't it just be copied? Are there even any unique ideas left? I have been feeling rather unmotivated lately. And then an idea popped up that caught my eye.

An app to remember

I have been watching app trends on Product Hunt, Indie Hackers and Idea Browser and an app idea surfaced a few days ago, Memory Keeper. Memory Keeper is a tool that lets families capture voice clips and images to remember stories in the past and share them with loved ones. It is specifically targeted towards families that have elder relatives with dementia or other memory illnesses. It uses AI to generate relevant story prompts to encourage users to share their experiences. Then it replays those experiences and memories to the elder relative to help them remember. Or at least that's the promise for $15/month.

My grandmother had Alzheimer's disease and we lived through her slowly forgetting her memories. For me, I think this app could go both ways. I could have shared my memories with her, but we could have used it to preserve her memories for us.

The entrepreneur in me was sad I had missed the opportunity to have this idea first. I know I could build this and I relate strongly to the message. I had to try the app myself. I downloaded Memory Keeper.

Has anyone actually used this?

When I opened the app, there was a login and sign up screen that opened first, and the login details were already filled in with an email I had never seen before, but it felt familiar.

It took me a moment, but I realized the email was the same name as the app developer. He had hardcoded his own email into the app's login page! So I decided to log in. I was instantly greeted with a vibe code special.

I've seen enough AI generated apps to know what the default themes look like. At this point I knew I was dealing with AI slop, but I didn't realize how far the neglect ran. I checked out the user settings and tried to change the reminder time.

Had the developer even opened the app?

Then I saw there was a data policy button. Of course there would be a data policy, this app is storing some incredibly sensitive data. If I were using the app, I'd want guarantees around encryption and security. I clicked the button.

Unbelievable.

According to Idea Browser, this app had seen a 12,592% increase in search engine traffic in the last 2 months, and it doesn't even work!

Building and publishing an app isn't free either. Just to get an Apple developer account is $120, plus the AI subscription used to build the app at ~$100-$300, add on a website and some hosting, you are easily at $300-$400+. Not a crazy amount of money, but certainly enough that you might want to log in once before you publish it with your name on it.

A strange place for hope

I decided I needed to email the developer and share some of my findings. I very diplomatically laid out the shortcomings I had encountered and expressed my concerns around the lack of transparency with the nonexistent data policy. This was the reply:

Hi Matthew,

Thanks for sharing, we will look into it and promptly update it accordingly

Do let us know if you have any other feedback

Any other feedback? The app doesn't work!

The utter lack of humility and self-awareness in this response gave me a strange sense of hope. I've been afraid to put myself out there and launch an app or product because why would someone want something from me? Why would anyone buy my software? But if someone can be so brazen to put out AI slop like that app and then not even care when it doesn't work, then the bar is much lower than I could have imagined.

So what now?

I'm not saying that I'm going to go out and make a memory keeper app tomorrow, but there is some comfort in knowing I could and I could do a much better job than this. This experience opened my eyes to how far people are willing to go to make a few dollars.

With the abundance of AI apps popping up, I think product quality matters more than ever. To build a quality software product, it takes more than just AI and an idea. You have to care about your customer. You need to actually use your app the way they would.

I know that if I'm going to build something, I'm going to give it my all. I'm going to care deeply about the problem I'm solving and work hard to build the best product I can. I know that it might not be perfect, but I can promise you that it wouldn't have my email hardcoded in the login.