How to Avoid “Name Slop”: Why AI-Generated Names Fail & What to Do About It

"Name slop" warns that AI spits out polished but interchangeable names—repeating familiar patterns and suffixes—which hurts memorability, trust, and raises legal/rebrand risk. People buy meaning, not words; great names must be defensible, pronounceable, discoverable, and able to carry a story. Use AI for ideas and speed, but let humans apply trademark checks, phonetic tests, category clarity, and narrative judgment before choosing.

Chapters

• 0:05 Welcome & Introduction
• 0:48 Why Name Slop Matters
• 1:35 How AI Creates Name Slop
• 2:20 What AI Misses
• 3:07 Real Costs of Name Slop
• 3:57 Final Takeaway

Transcript

Ashley Elliott (00:05):

Well, happy new year and welcome back to Naming in the AI Age. I'm Ashley Elliott, and today we're talking about Name Slop. Why endless AI output doesn't really give you originality, it gives you sameness. Name slop are really names that look plausible, but they don't really have anything to it. There's no story, there's no trust, and sometimes no legal safety. Think about your last scroll. How many headlines really felt almost just interchangeable? Sure, they were polished, they looked nice, but they felt like they could be replaced with the exact same thing on a different article. That's what Kelly Fletcher calls in her article, which we've linked in our show notes, The Sea of Sameness. There are hundreds of perfected, optimized messages that all really blur together. They look like marketing, they read like marketing, but they don't really feel like anything at all. Why should we care about this?

(00:48):

Well, two words, trust and memory. People don't buy words. They buy stories, values, emotion. When every brand starts sounding like it was printed from the same template, people really stop trusting any of them. And if they don't remember you, well, they don't choose you. So what's the name slop exactly? Name slop really is this pile that looks like these are viable names. They check all the boxes, maybe they feel modern, or vibey, or this brand type of cadence, but they fail where it matters. Distinctiveness, phonetics, legal discernibility, defensibility, discoverability, and most important, story. They're like the junk drawer of naming. You have a lot of stuff, but none of it really feels worth keeping. That's a reminder in the new year to clean out your junk drawer, by the way. Generative AI is spectacular at one thing. Pattern matching. Need a 300-word blog about TikTok's algorithm changes?

(01:35):

Boom. Need 20 social posts with on- brand keywords? Done. That's the power. But the same strength of AI, those copying of patterns is also a weakness when it comes to naming. Here's why AI creates name slot. Really first, it's backwards looking. So models remix what's already on the web, not what a future name or a novel innovative name could be. It amplifies what's already popular. The more a suffix or structure is used, the more AI suggests it, and then suddenly everybody has LY or Able at the end of their name. It gives you quantity, but not craft. You have hundreds of options that feel like a good choice, but they're often really near duplicates. It also misses those practical checks. You have phonetics, the cadence, trademark collisions, all the stuff that make us humans sweat at the end of the day. And most of all, it has no lived experience.

(02:20):

No founder jokes, no late night customer service story that shapes the voice. Name slop isn't just annoying, really. It can also cost you money. Real measurable costs. Think about a discovery loss. Your product is buried because it's indistinguishable from the other brands in your space. It looks just like them. It sounds just like them. Or maybe a decay of trust because you sound like everything else that's already out there. You could also run into potential legal and rebrand costs, trademark battles or force renames. So yes, AI can speed things up, but when misused, it creates expenses, not savings. So let's introduce a name slop filter. These are some non-negotiable quick passes you can do before you celebrate and lock and load on a name. First, we have a trademark quick pass. Are there really any obvious conflicts on the USPTO website? On Google, we have a whole series on our channel about trademarks.

(03:07):

Domain or handle quick passes. Can we secure the. Com? Are there social media platforms that have this name available for use? Or the phonetic test? Say it on a call. Say it two times fast. Tell it to your friends. Does it sound good? A category signal. Maybe a busy user, can they really just look at your name and infer what you do within three seconds? Or a longer story test? Can you tell a 15-second brand story with the name really as that lead? Are your values reflected? Does the name signal your promise and not just good keywords? If you've used AI, is there a disclosure? If it helped create the name or the copy, is it transparent? If you can't check these boxes, you might want to huddle back up and regroup. Name slop is what happens when fast pattern matching AI spits out these me too sounding names that lack distinctiveness, phonetic usability, legal defensibility, and really just the key human stories that build trust and memory.

(03:57):

Protect your brand by treating AI as a stimulus only. And use our name swap filter for trademark domain phonetics to really make that final call. We want the final call to be a human strategic decision, not AI. Thanks for joining me on the first episode of 2026. We kicked off the year talking about why humanity and the human voice matters now more than ever, and we're just getting started. Join us next time. Bye.