Lemme tell you something — and feel free to picture me as a crotchety old punk, shaking my fist at the heavens…
AI slop is not a new problem.
The value of human creativity — especially writing, especially in a business context — has *always* been undervalued, dismissed, underestimated, and exploited to within an inch of its life.
This has been true in the online business world for as long as there’s been an online business world, because the online service economy was built on an infrastructure of extraction:
“How much money can we squeeze out of our customers?”
“How much work can we squeeze out of our service providers, and how little can we get away with paying them?”
“What triggers and levers can I push and pull to make my reader so uncomfortable that they feel compelled to give me their money — even if I can’t actually help them and don’t give a shit about them?”
Writing skill in these spaces was always treated nonchalantly, like a hand-wavey throwaway that anyone could do.
The primary motivator in this system was not quality, or creation, or generosity, or helping people, or making the world a better place.
It was profit.
And anything that takes a long time (like good writing and editing) cuts into that profit. So, writing was treated and taught as a means to an end, a tool for persuasion.
And THAT resulted in an internet full of slop, which AI has now been fully trained on.
But slop goes back even further than that...
Writing has always been a weird profession. There’s a built-in misconception that as long as you can make letters — type ‘em, write ‘em, put ‘em in a stew — you can write. This has led to a lot of people making a lot of letters that aren’t necessarily good to read.
But because some of those letters were made by mediocre men who had disproportionate access to power and resources, many mediocre men were able to publish their crappy writing and pretend it was actually good.
They were also able to distribute this crappy writing, inflate their sales stats, and then point back to those stats as evidence of their greatness.
Some version of this cycle has existed since humans were writing by candlelight with quill pens. And, like everything else, the industrial revolution blew it wide open, and then the internet enabled it to silently weave all that crappy writing into the background, until it became as unnoticeable and ever-present as air.
There's also a dearth of avid, attention-paying readers in modern society, for reasons I don’t feel like researching. (I'm not talking here about people for whom reading is a privilege and a luxury they can't afford.)
If you don’t read, you won’t know what good writing is supposed to look like. AI slop will “sound fine” to your ear, because your ear is untrained and half-distracted by whatever’s on your phone.
In short...
WE are the ones responsible for AI slop. Not AI.
The call is coming from inside the house.
And other clichés.
“You maniacs! You blew it up… god damn you all to hell!”
Even now that AI slop is a recognized type of content, and pretty much everyone agrees that it’s not the kind of content we want to create or consume, the mainstream conversation is STILL not about craft or intentionality or humanity, because those things are slow and friction-y and you know, not optimized or whatever. They are ineffable; they cannot be distilled into tidy prompts and templates.
THAT would solve this whole slop problem… for life.
P.S. I currently have five beta spots open for 1-1 writing coaching. Two different tiers, and we can work on whatever tickles your fancy.
One of my clients is writing a book just because. Another is working on submitting personal essays for publication. And one guy is writing think pieces about The Sopranos, so he can learn how to write an argument for school.
A few weeks ago I told you I was reading Hamlet for fun because I am a nerd, but also because I had "assigned" it to a client and felt it was only fair.
Okay but it's like, really good.
Shakespeare's works are challenging not just because of the old English (that's mostly just a vocab issue). They're challenging because of the poetic rhythms, the double entendres, the way he messes with sentence structure to create a more pleasing cadence.
This is actually a wonderful example of one of my pet favorite craft elements — and one that I rarely teach because it's kind of pretentious and fiddly — wordplay.
Wordplay is when you utilize both the meaning of a word, and the sounds it makes when you say it. Take this example from "How Soon is Now?" by The Smiths:
I am the son and the heir
Of a shyness that is criminally vulgar
I am the son and heir
Of nothing in particular
When Morrissey sings these lines, it also sounds like he's saying, "I am the sun... and the air." The rest of the verse adds context, but the lyric works either way.
Similarly, there's this exchange in Hamlet:
KING: How is it that the clouds still hang on you? HAMLET: Not so, my lord; I am too much in the sun.
The "king" here is Hamlet's uncle, who recently murdered his own brother (Hamlet's dad) and immediately took up with the queen (Hamlet's mom). Hamlet is grossed out by this and totally wrecked; in this scene the king and queen are bugging him for being a sad sack.
He responds to "the clouds" with "the sun," but he also means he's too much a son, as in, the death of his father is not something he can get over, nor is his mother's incestuous uncle-fucking. (SORRY)
Wordplay!
Speaking of the son and the heir, here's a clip from a BBC adaptation of Hamlet starring Andrew Scott. This performance wrung me OUT; I don't understand how actors can do this every night.