Don't Fall for AI: Reasons for Writers to Reject Slop
mythcreants.com
mythcreants.com
I'm a huge William S. Burroughs fan, and, for those unfamiliar, he and a few others invented an algorithmic technique, the "Cut-up technique" [0], to basically remix their writing. It's a major part of the reason that much of Burroughs' work as a magically confusing aspect to it.
"Prompt and pasting" from LLMs is dull, but awhile back I was experimenting with token-explorer [1] to see what would happen if I started with a prompt and explored the "high-entropy" states of the LLM. By controlling the sample path to stay in a high-entropy state you start getting very different types of responses that feel like nothing that normally comes from an LLM. You could argue it's a form of "statistical automatic writing" [2]
There is tremendous potential for genuinely interesting writing to be created with an LLM but it's going to require popping open the box and playing around. In the Stable Diffusion world there's lots of people trying all sorts of odd experiments to create things and, while not the mainstay of generative AI images, they are able to create really interesting things.
I would love to see more people ripping open local LLMs and seeing just what the real posibilities are.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique
I have a set of "story telling dice" that you toss and use the result as a writing prompt.
High entropy has existed in other forms (as you point out) before LLMs.
The last few days, I let the intrusive thoughts win, and I played around with automating the process of building themes, characters, outlining, drafting, and revising a novel with the Gemini API, pausing between steps to manually edit each document. It’s crude, but with enough cycles of “read the last draft, write instructions for improving it, redo everything with those instructions” the end result is shockingly not terrible.
It’s not great. Good might even be too far. It’s derivative, and still feels like the embodiment of all the negative connotations of the term “genre fiction”.
Yet, I can’t escape the fact that it’s better reading than what I write. It is objectively less intellectually “interesting”, and it doesn’t have my “voice”, my artistic fingerprint. But it’s entertaining enough that I could see myself reading it at bedtime for fun, a sentiment I’ve never felt for my own writing.
And all that for a pittance of the effort it takes to write a long story. I’m still not sure how to feel about it. It’s sapping my willpower to continue writing “for real”, in the face of being able to “give life” to the characters and story ideas I’ve had languishing for a decade. I know that it’s not “real”, that the stories are superficial, and that the existence of these models is at best ethically questionable.
But for stories that, either way, I’ll probably never share with anyone else, it’s hard to feel that principled about it, in the face of a miserable comparison between my prose and an LLM’s prose. I’m sure if I wrote fiction for a living, I’d feel as passionate as the article’s author, but in my case, it’s just the melancholy of mediocrity. Ah well :-)
I worry we will have a lot less good writers or artists in the future. Everyone starts bad, without the skill. The hurdle is, why should I put in effort to learn, if AI is already somewhat good.
Someone mentioned here before, we learn to judge skill before we can learn the skill itself. The drive to jump the gap is what creates the genius.
Please don't give up, you can do it!
how exactly?
it's already trained on the entire corpus of human generated text and outputs garbage
there's not a second internet to plagiarise
1. everyone with any content of value is now blocking the AI crawlers, because they suck up content and resources whilst offering nothing in return
2. the only people not blocking them are websites that are entirely AI slop
the high point may have be in the past...
"Good" in which sense? That people read it and/or pay for it? But people already did, before LLMs: they read and paid for the most terrible, cliched, trite stuff. I mean, there are whole genres that are basically trash, before anyone even dreamed of AI (I'm pretty sure 90% of mainstream Hollywood script writers can be replaced by an LLM; they already feel like they were written by one anyway. This is not praise of LLMs, it's criticism of Hollywood!).
Surely, then, a "good" book is not merely something people will read or pay for. So why would AI become "good" at it, in which sense?
Reading/writing is a human activity. If you cut humans from a big part of the loop, how can the result ever be good?
This isn't the same context as writing code or building apps.
It was made out of a few wheels, the outer one larger than the inner ones, all attached with a pin in the middle. He had written types and characters and events on the edges of the outer wheels.
He would ask you how the movie starts, what were the main characters, adjust the outer wheels containing these items and get the rest of the plot with very high accuracy.
Hollywood is a home of amazing masterful artists but the suits mostly bet on what has proven to work.
I didn't mean to say the people who work in Hollywood don't know their craft, plenty of skilled people who I'm sure would produce wonderful work (and sometimes do!) if given the chance.
I meant Hollywood as this machinery of algorithmic clones, as described perfectly by your anecdote about Buñuel.
Fun fact: we actually don't, that's a leap of faith on your part.
This problem isn't new. People don't create art based on supply and demand. I don't think there's a future where people stop making things just because computers can do it too. It may be impossible to make a living off of art, but we will keep making it. Ask artists today and many will tell you it never felt like a choice to begin with.
I typed my original comment in a despondent mood while eating. Born out of frustration with not having much time between my dayjob and family to practice/write, which gives the LLM's ability to effortlessly write prose a bitter taste.
Reflecting on it more, though, I'm not as bothered. I don't _really_ care if an LLM is "better" than me, now or in the future, because I do enjoy the process of reflecting my ideas and experiences onto page, or, word processor.
And, beyond that, the homogeneity and uniformity of the LLM output is kind of exhausting. I'm sure this is something that can be "improved" at various stages of the pipeline, but some imperfection and variety is nice too.
for me the difference is simply that AI writing has no author, nobody thought those words, and that is big to me.
I mean most obviously: that's because you didn't write it. It has a novelty to it that you don't experience when you write and re-write a story yourself.
More importantly though: as G.K. Chesterton supposedly said "Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly". The idea that you shouldn't write because you're not as good as you could be or you shouldn't plink around on keyboard because you can't play Bach is an idea that destroys any human endeavor and all human joy.
If they are stories that you will never share: why care about quality; it should be pure self exploration.
You can get better at writing. And i hate to say, you probably only judge your own writing so harshly because you wrote it. Songs i wrote that i didn't like ended up being some of my most popular. It doesn't matter though: other people liking it is a fantastic bonus on top of my enjoying having done it, not the point of having done it.
We like playing. We like human touch. That’s still there.
Isn't the future going to be so great?
Sure, some people won’t, but we’re already at the point where AI has ruined any sense of reality online.
Related to that, I saw a local band posting marketing material online, that was this kind of amateurish typography with a collage of photos decorated with coloured markers. 2 years ago I'd be laughing at what a terrible job it was, today, it's a breath of fresh human air from all the slop we're subjected to all over the internet. It caught my attention, so much that I'm going to see the band this weekend.
It's not quite that simple. Many moons ago I taught RSA IT skills levels 2 and three. Hmmm I used a plural for levels and a literal 2 and spelt out three.
You are probably not 50+ years old and have not had to run anti spam email systems for several decades! When you are deciding whether something is created by something other than is claimed, you need way more "rules" than typos and that.
Look at the language in use: A fair sign of AI is banality, verbosity and obsequiousness.
Please don't look upon lazy spelling and grammar as a sign of authenticity: "Its how real people work" - it isn't. That will be mercilessly abused by the baddies. Unfortunately we will all have to raise our game and be proactive in spotting baddies.
Also, please don't become too worried about all this stuff. The bubble will eventually burst.
You be you and look after yourself. Take care.
Also, the vast majority of stuff ever written isn't worth reading, so filtering your feed for stuff that's worth reading isn't new to the AI age.
Flash websites no one watched. Carousels. Consultants saying "we need a viral". Every product needed a MySpace page, to be prefixed with an "i", or to have most vowels removed. Blue-and-orange film posters.
All those trends will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
I can spot AI writing very quickly now, after just a few sentences or paragraphs. It became a lot easier to spot after I tried to use it in my own writing.
Calling it “slop” is far too generous.
If you know what you want to say, you might think to yourself “I’ll have this write an outline or a first draft that I will then thoroughly edit.”
And every time, what you’ll find is that the LLM output is fundamentally unusable. Points a subtly missing. Points are subtly repeated. Points are miscategorized. Points don’t make sense at all. Points don’t flow in a logical order.
If you try to use an LLM and you don’t know what you want to say, then it’s hopeless. You absolutely will not see the defects. If anyone who knows the subjects reads it, they will instantly know you are a lying piece of shit.
Not denying this is true — but like a lot of what we've seen with AI, lets see how you feel in two years time when the models have improved as much.
I think it was actually Brian Eno that said it (essentially): whatever you laugh about with regard to LLMs today, watch out, because next year that funny thing they did will no longer be present.
Comparing base and instruction-tuned models, the base models are vaguely human in style, while instruction-tuned models systematically prefer certain types of grammar and style features. (For example, GPT-4o loves participial clauses and nominalizations.) https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16107
When I've looked at more recent models like o3, there are other style shifts. The newer OpenAI models increasingly use bold, bulleted lists, and headings -- much more than, say, GPT-3.5 did.
So you get what you optimize for. OpenAI wants short, punchy, bulleted answers that sound authoritative, and that's what they get. But that's not how humans write, and so it'll remain easy to spot AI writing.
People have been saying this for years now though
I don't think they are any better at coding than they were. I think people are lowering their standards to what LLMs can accomplish, not that LLMs have risen to meet our standards
You can recognize garbage, not AI.
AI produced garbage have taken the place of human produced garbage.
Saying AI is useless shit because advertisement, spam and the slop industry have put it to work is the same as saying all Human writing is shit because you got a penis enlargement spam email written by a human and you could recognize it as spam email. Even an AI will recognize the flaw in your thinking.
But the scary part is that maybe AI will be able to write stories people want to read. In that case, yes, writers will suffer, just as performing musicians suffered when records/radios appeared, and recording musicians suffered when MP3/streaming appeared.
Even worse, we won't know which future will happen until it actually does. And by then, of course, it will be too late.
Some percentage of people have always read whatever was set in front of them. That hasn't stopped good writing from being read and widely consumed.
Every artist has stolen. I mean, that's probably putting too fine a point on things, but you'd have to show me a painting someone has created where they never saw another artist's work before. Or a book written by someone who never read a book before.
I drew all the time as a kid — making a point at age 12 to learn to draw the human figure. I started with the standard proportions that every decent book on drawing the human figure puts forth. I started with shapes representing the hips, the rib cage, the skull — you sketch lines determined by muscles over those hard structures. You draw the clavicle, divot defining the knee caps, suggest the inverted triangle over the figures back-side, shoulder blades protruding....
And in time I started looking at how Mort Drucker drew mouths. How another MAD artist did pockets on short-sleeve shirts. How Angelo Torres draws the ears....
In time you become an amalgam of your favorite bits and pieces of your favorite artists.
(And then you find out that R. Crumb was lifting styles from Warner Brothers, etc. when he was ramping up his craft. But of course he did.)
The fact it’s AI is the issue.
To your left, you see a door with quality writing. With engaging, beautiful topics, interesting writers. You have to pay a very small amount to enter.
To your right, you see a door with AI slop. Repetitive writing, everything is totally fake, no humans involved, and not really very interesting. EVERYTHING tries to sell you stuff. Slop and enshittification are a constant. It is also free to enter."
... there was such a stampede a the right door the door needs replacing, in fact, the floor leading to the door needs repairing.
It gets more complicated by the fact that many people don't mark what's AI and what's not, and harder to be certain every day. Many people putting out the slop will have different priorities, and don't care if they're wasting my time.
Meandering back to your point, I would be happy to look at AI-co-created art as long as I knew in advance that it significantly expressed the mind of the human who created it.
Since I can't get people to mark what is AI, I've instead considered signing off all my writing with:
(The above was written by a human without assistance from AI)
(Come to think of it, sounds like a good cosplay opportunity. Go as "Jodorowsky's Tron AI Slop".)
[1] https://static.wixstatic.com/media/9414a3_977e028d2ca6472294...
GenAI and creativity — this doesn't have to be a dichotomy.
it triggers the same eye roll as the schoolyard bully nicknames so popular in politics right now. bite sized, zero effort, fashionable take downs that suffocate any attempt at genuine discourse.
but I am probably just grumpy and old.
More slop is a bad, not a good thing.
I would point out what they're criticizing is also lazy and driven by trends, the reflexive acceptance that whatever is new is inevitable and must be embraced. To me "slop" especially feels splashing someone with a bucket of water to try and wake them up from a stupor.
And maybe I'm a little too optimistic? Because I see a world in a few years when AI is producing content good enough that those still calling it "slop" will come across as sounding a little shrill.
I want to know a person's ideas, not a computers regurgitation of others'. It's low effort and usually lacks a point.
Now it doesnt have zero usefulness in writing/the arts. Probably tons tbh. For instance someone using AI voice because they aren't an English speaker and want to talk to that audience, or using it to clean up grainy film is different (in my opinion) than genning the writing or art.
Things made without enough human in the loop - I've found - lack purpose and identity. I dont see AI changing there. If it wasn't a good idea from the start, ai isn't gonna fix that. No amount of awesome cgi or a-list actors saves a terrible script.
The only people I see pushing stuff like ai music is spotify so it doesn't have to pay royalties, but everyone I speak to hates it. The listeners, artists, and the record labels those models stole from. Probably instrument and audio software makers too. When people figure out a pic is AI they voice frustration and embarrassment.
There's more in the word 'slop' than just bad content. Comments/posts on here or reddit often get slaughtered solely because it was written by AI and the user wasn't skilled enough to hide it. Some people just don't like reading something a machine trying to sound like a person wrote.
I don't doubt we will advance to the stage where it becomes on the same level quality-wise, but doubt most people would be wanting AI content while human made stuff is available. It will still be considered low effort slop by many, I believe.