The Cure for A.I. Slop
By now you've no doubt seen the headlines. A number of authors got caught uploading soft smut books to Amazon with chatbot prompts left in the text. Not only that, the blunder exposed at least one of them for feeding another writer’s style into the machine.
Are we looking at a series of honest mistakes? Or evidence of something more ominous?
Maybe if these incidents were confined to a book or two here and there, we could shrug and move on. But it’s not one book, or even a single author. As this article from Futurism points out, we’re looking at a trend. A.I.-generated novels are flooding Amazon. Forget rapid release; some unscrupulous authors are cranking out titles fast enough to make Walter B. Gibson blush.
And readers are noticing.
Related: A.I. Books: The Death of the Author?
Let’s set the moral panic aside for a second. Forget the “A.I. is theft” grandstanding and the virtue signaling from people who only noticed because sloppy authors left in the prompts, and who only got outraged because their taste for hollow slop was revealed to all and sundry.
The real issue where readers are concerned is quality. Because when machine-written fiction becomes indistinguishable from human writing, quality assurance becomes more important than ever.
Related: Larry Correia and the A.I. Enthusiasm Deficit
To dispense with a persistent zombie meme up front, publishing is not a meritocracy. It never was. The Big Five are gatekeepers, yes, but they’re not curators of literary excellence. They’re a secular priestly caste performing ritual purity tests. Once, they filtered out the unpublishable. But now that wall around their former fiefdom has crumbled, anyone can publish.
That’s good if you’re serious about your craft. But it also means no one's checking your work unless you hire someone to do it.
With tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, anyone can generate a story. But generating isn’t writing. Writing is an art, and art is work performed to a standard. That means comparing your work to an objective standard, and as everyone knows, maintaining total objectivity about your own work is next to impossible.
Even if you really buckle down and go over your draft line by line, your brain will play tricks on you; glossing over misspellings, adding or subtracting whole words, and papering over elements that don’t work. Because brains aren’t just pattern-recognizing engines, they’re pattern-making engines. And yours will actually hallucinate that what you intended to put on the page is there, because it knows you want it to be there.
And that’s the key insight, here. At the end of the day, A.I. is a tool that does what you tell it you want done. That might seem like a tautology, but nowhere in that equation do we find any guarantee that …
The A.I. will perform the work according to professional quality standards, or
all of the writer’s prompts express ideas that are up to snuff.
It’s essential to cut through the Big Tech hype and remember that A.I. isn’t magic; it’s a model. And the quality of that model’s outputs depends on its programmers’ ability and the training data its given. We already discussed how oldpub gatekeepers devolved into bone-rattling ideologue shamans. Guess what—Big Tech bros make Manhattan literati look grounded. So authors who leave their books entirely in A.I.’s hands are trusting transhumanist goofballs and faceless committees of online randos with their QA.
Related: Why A.I. Music Can't Replicate the Human Touch
What the preceding spiel means is that the A.I. trend doesn’t replace writers; it replaces hacks. Sad to say, some of those hacks have found audiences. And as the market floods, even the sincere newpub author faces suspicion. “Was this written by a bot?” is now a fair question.
As is asking if the images in this post were drawn by bots.
Which brings us back to the role of the editor.
In the past, editors acted as curators. Not just glorified typo detectors, they looked for story structure problems, character inconsistencies, and pacing issues. Now, they have a new job: digital exorcist. The red pen doesn’t just fix bad writing; it confirms that writing was done at all.
If you're a writer who takes the craft seriously, having an editor is to your competitive advantage more than ever. So use it!
Hire editors who can spot formulaic sludge, passive voice, mechanical dialogue, and recycled plot arcs
don’t rely on a machine to do your thinking for you! Get an objective third party to work with you, ensuring your prose won’t come off as regurgitated slop
and just as important, harden your book against increasingly common accusations by having someone real who can vouch for your work’s authenticity.
A.I. tools might be useful for brainstorming, but the final product needs the human touch.
When WarGate Books pulled Strange Company 3 from Amazon and sold it directly, they proved readers will go out of their way to support real creators. The rapid release kings proved that people aren’t looking for volume; they want voices they can trust.
Related: Amazon vs WarGate: 3 Times Is Enemy Action
So to answer the obvious question: No, A.I. won’t kill newpub. But it will sift the field. The slop will sink, and its corner-cutting purveyors will go down with it. What remains will be a professional class of authors who know how to write—and editors who can bring the receipts.
In the meantime, keep writing real books.
Because readers are watching.
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