To travel through the New York City subway system these days is to be assailed by technobabble. Legions of tech startups have been founded in recent years, hoping to strike it rich in the AI gold rush—and all of them jostling for consumers’ attention in an increasingly crowded market. The result has been a deluge of ads selling some AI-powered product or other. It’s not always easy to know what exactly is being sold, though. AI isn’t a physical product, like a smartphone or a car, and not even the software engineers who build it can tell you exactly how it works. “The ads kind of have to be vague, because the product is vague,” Harris Alterman, a comedian living in New York City, recently told me. The sheer number and inscrutability of these ads can feel a bit disorienting, not unlike the feeling of scrolling through social media and seeing one AI-generated video after another. Alterman has coined a phrase to describe the mind-numbing quality of modern tech advertising: “slop voice.” Earlier this year, Alterman and his friend and fellow comedian Dave Ross started noticing more and more of these inscrutable AI ads plastered across the city, especially in the subway. They all seemed to follow the same basic aesthetic recipe: minimalist graphic design, and copy filled with obscure jargon like “agentic,” “orchestration layer,” and “business intelligence.”