There’s been a lot of talk in the writing community lately about AI, and for good reason. Authors used to worry about people posting their books to pirate sites. Now, we’re worried about our books being (poorly) rewritten by an AI program and reposted under numerous (false) pen names by somebody else. Someone who makes money from our intellectual works, when we already make so little. 

If you think I’m overstating the case, let me tell you about an author who was recently contacted by a reader about exactly this scenario. The re-make of her book didn’t even bother to change the names of the characters. And she has already found more than one sifting across the internet. 

Which brings me to a second problem: Slop. Maybe if you read too much, you’ve heard the term before, but I recently learned that “slop” refers to all the useless, clogging items on the internet that are written by either AI programs or chatbots, all accumulating on the internet and unbalancing our ideas of what the internet really is (or whether it’s useful). 

If you’re interested in doing a deep dive on the subject, I recommend an article by Max Read in New York magazine, “Drowning in Slop.” Encapsulating the problem perfectly, the article begins with a vivid passage about a sci-fi magazine editor who put out a call for submissions and received—I kid you not—literally hundreds of iterations of the same bad sci-fi story, each written with AI. Suffice it to say, the editor had to stop taking (real) submissions due to the overwhelm of, you got it, Slop. 

This editor’s slop, though, wasn’t created by aimless chatbots botting harmlessly at each other (and Elon Musk) on X. It was created by humans, who, for some unknown reason, thought it would be easier to submit an AI-program’s spittings than writing their own story. (If you’re wondering about motive, it’s probably that the magazine pays, and quite handsomely). It’s not that these folks necessarily meant to become scammers. They were obviously looking for a payday, and, let’s face it, any payday for an author is a good payday. 

But why bother to write at all if you require AI to do it for you? I hope I don’t offend anyone here in the blab-o-sphere, but I honestly don’t understand why a person would write anything if they don’t first have a kernel of an idea, something to say. Something to share. Sure, it doesn’t have to be earth-shattering or groundbreaking—we can’t all be Dostoyevsky—but if you require a program to do your creative thinking and imagining for you, I don’t mind drawing a line in the sand and saying you’re probably in the wrong line of work. 

Writing is work. It’s bloody hard work. For most of us, it’s something we do on the side instead of staying late at the fun party. It’s what we do on Christmas vacation—hell, any vacation. All of this is to say, I have two lines of advice to you folks out there. 

One. Don’t use AI to create your works. Have some human pride in your capabilities and do the hard work required of you to produce something worthwhile. 

And two: If you see an AI scam in play, let someone know. Reach out to the author. Email the chatbots at Kindle. Do what you can to stop the people behind the AI from making money off some of the poorest paid folks on the planet.

A friend of mine has a saying, and it’s a pretty simple one: Don’t be an asshole. And that quote, my friends, is 100% attributable to a human.