Culture Magazine Urges Professional Writers to Resist AI, Boycott and Stigmatize AI Slop (nplusonemag.com) 39
The editors of the culture magazine n + 1 decry the "well-funded upheaval" caused by a large and powerful coalition of pro-AI forces. ("According to the logic of market share as social transformation, if you move fast and break enough things, nothing can contain you...")
"An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. But marketing is not destiny." The AI bubble — and it is a bubble, as even OpenAI overlord Sam Altman has admitted — will burst. The technology's dizzying pace of improvement, already slowing with the release of GPT-5, will stall... [P]rofessional readers and writers: We retain some power over the terms and norms of our own intellectual life. We ought to stop acting like impotence in some realms means impotence everywhere. Major terrains remain AI-proofable. For publishers, editors, critics, professors, teachers, anyone with any say over what people read, the first step will be to develop an ear. Learn to tell — to read closely enough to tell — the work of people from the work of bots...
Whatever nuance is needed for its interception, resisting AI's further creep into intellectual labor will also require blunt-force militancy. The steps are simple. Don't publish AI bullshit. Don't even publish mealymouthed essays about the temptation to produce AI bullshit. Resist the call to establish worthless partnerships like the Washington Post's Ember, an "AI writing coach" designed to churn out Bezos-friendly op-eds. Instead, do what better magazines, newspapers, and journals have managed for centuries. Promote and produce original work of value, work that's cliché-resistant and unreplicable, work that tries — as Thomas Pynchon wrote in an oracular 1984 essay titled "Is It OK to Be a Luddite?" — "through literary means which are nocturnal and deal in disguise, to deny the machine...."
Punishing already overdisciplined and oversurveilled students for their AI use will help no one, but it's a long way from accepting that reality to Ohio State's new plan to mandate something called "AI fluency" for all graduates by 2029 (including workshops sponsored, naturally, by Google). Pedagogically, alternatives to acquiescence remain available. Some are old, like blue-book exams, in-class writing, or one-on-one tutoring. Some are new, like developing curricula to teach the limits and flaws of generative AI while nurturing human intelligence...
Our final defenses are more diffuse, working at a level of norms and attitudes. Stigmatization is a powerful force, and disgust and shame are among our greatest tools. Put plainly, you should feel bad for using AI. (The broad embrace of the term slop is a heartening sign of a nascent constituency for machine denial.) These systems haven't worked well for very long, and consensus about their use remains far from settled. That's why so much writing about AI writing sounds the way it does — nervous, uneven, ambivalent about the new regime's utility — and it means there's still time to disenchant AI, provincialize it, make it uncompelling and uncool...
As we train our sights on what we oppose, let's recall the costs of surrender. When we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. We abet the acceleration of a social media gyre that everyone admits is making life worse. We accept the further degradation of an already degraded educational system. We agree that we would rather deplete our natural resources than make our own art or think our own thoughts... A literature which is made by machines, which are owned by corporations, which are run by sociopaths, can only be a "stereotype" — a simplification, a facsimile, an insult, a fake — of real literature. It should be smashed, and can.
The 3,800-word article also argues that "perhaps AI's ascent in knowledge-industry workplaces will give rise to new demands and new reasons to organize..."
"An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. But marketing is not destiny." The AI bubble — and it is a bubble, as even OpenAI overlord Sam Altman has admitted — will burst. The technology's dizzying pace of improvement, already slowing with the release of GPT-5, will stall... [P]rofessional readers and writers: We retain some power over the terms and norms of our own intellectual life. We ought to stop acting like impotence in some realms means impotence everywhere. Major terrains remain AI-proofable. For publishers, editors, critics, professors, teachers, anyone with any say over what people read, the first step will be to develop an ear. Learn to tell — to read closely enough to tell — the work of people from the work of bots...
Whatever nuance is needed for its interception, resisting AI's further creep into intellectual labor will also require blunt-force militancy. The steps are simple. Don't publish AI bullshit. Don't even publish mealymouthed essays about the temptation to produce AI bullshit. Resist the call to establish worthless partnerships like the Washington Post's Ember, an "AI writing coach" designed to churn out Bezos-friendly op-eds. Instead, do what better magazines, newspapers, and journals have managed for centuries. Promote and produce original work of value, work that's cliché-resistant and unreplicable, work that tries — as Thomas Pynchon wrote in an oracular 1984 essay titled "Is It OK to Be a Luddite?" — "through literary means which are nocturnal and deal in disguise, to deny the machine...."
Punishing already overdisciplined and oversurveilled students for their AI use will help no one, but it's a long way from accepting that reality to Ohio State's new plan to mandate something called "AI fluency" for all graduates by 2029 (including workshops sponsored, naturally, by Google). Pedagogically, alternatives to acquiescence remain available. Some are old, like blue-book exams, in-class writing, or one-on-one tutoring. Some are new, like developing curricula to teach the limits and flaws of generative AI while nurturing human intelligence...
Our final defenses are more diffuse, working at a level of norms and attitudes. Stigmatization is a powerful force, and disgust and shame are among our greatest tools. Put plainly, you should feel bad for using AI. (The broad embrace of the term slop is a heartening sign of a nascent constituency for machine denial.) These systems haven't worked well for very long, and consensus about their use remains far from settled. That's why so much writing about AI writing sounds the way it does — nervous, uneven, ambivalent about the new regime's utility — and it means there's still time to disenchant AI, provincialize it, make it uncompelling and uncool...
As we train our sights on what we oppose, let's recall the costs of surrender. When we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. We abet the acceleration of a social media gyre that everyone admits is making life worse. We accept the further degradation of an already degraded educational system. We agree that we would rather deplete our natural resources than make our own art or think our own thoughts... A literature which is made by machines, which are owned by corporations, which are run by sociopaths, can only be a "stereotype" — a simplification, a facsimile, an insult, a fake — of real literature. It should be smashed, and can.
The 3,800-word article also argues that "perhaps AI's ascent in knowledge-industry workplaces will give rise to new demands and new reasons to organize..."
With all the market consolidation out there (Score:1, Flamebait)
The only real way to stop enshitification is by enforcing antitrust law so you can actually have competition again. Otherwise t
Re: With all the market consolidation out there (Score:2)
people create 100x more slop on social media, frok outsourced code slaves, legislation and progeny.
the AI stuff works good enough, I'm not entering it in art contest.
these Culture Magazine dudes are the Nuevo Luddites.
Re: With all the market consolidation out there (Score:2)
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Unless you're going to go completely out of your way to find human written content the major outlets owned by billionaires or just going to feed you AI slop.
I am going out of my way to find human-written content today. I will continue to do so. As I refuse to waste time and attention on anything that is not really good, I shall either avoid synthetic writings or find that some of them are so good that they are indistinguishable from the best human writing. In which case I shall enjoy them.
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Yeah, I get that you only read picture books - probably Marvel comics, and don't actually read, you know, novels.
I, and every other author I know has been screaming at the top of our lungs. Every legitimate editor - Neil Clarke comes to mind - have been fighting that crap, because that's all it is. None of the slop is new. As we keep saying, it's typeahead writ large. It's *never* going to come up with completely new - that takes a human.
And when AI and bots take over all jobs, when all the rest of us are o
James Patterson (Score:3)
The response to writers complaining about AI and destroying the industry is simple.
James Patterson.
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Re: James Patterson (Score:2)
If they haven't cancelled him yet; there's no reason to cancel AI.
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I believe topham's intended argument was that human writers can easily destroy the industry on their own, without an AI, and James Patterson was given as an example.
Patterson writes very fast.
Patterson writes a lot.
Patterson has sold a lot.
The quality of his books...YMMV, but to me they feel like written on autopilot.
I read one book by James Patterson. It was kind of ok.
Then I read two more. They were...so horrible I never again wanted to read anything by him. But like said, YMMV.
Ghosting (Score:3)
Patterson is known for hiring other authors to write his books and he slaps his name on them. The books he writes aren't bad. The books other authors write are of extremely variable quality.
The point is, you don't need AI to make garbage. It lets you make garbage much faster, but a million monkeys and a million typewriters and all...
OK Mac User (Score:2)
Learn to tellâS — âSto read closely enough to tellâS — âSthe work of people from the work of bots...
Speak english ffs...
Re: (Score:2)
Are you new to Slashdot?
ai can fix things (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe we can use AI to fix Slashdot's code to support Unicode.
Or at least run the articles through an LLM to have it clean up the non-ASCII characters.
Re: (Score:2)
Mod funnier but also too true.
However the Unicode was fixed years ago for the Japanese website with no "AI" help--but that website died a long time ago.
Mixed Metaphors (Score:3, Insightful)
"the boom in sophistication of LLMs over the past few years has struck alarm bells chiming"
"each piece in this emergent corpus stages a more collective drama"
"paints a persuasive picture of a world hollowed by machines"
"used the same handful of refried phrases over and over."
"wind up convinced that the technology marks an epochal shift"
If your idea of writing is to bullshit your way through a word count, then AI will do better than you.
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I imagine the writer wasn't thinking of those phrases as metaphors at all - just ready-to-hand, top-of-the-barrel cliches. Repeating cliches is popular, and far easier than thinking. Of course it's not very useful and it certainly is unaesthetic.
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I think the authors might have been aiming for a style that can't be replicated by LLMs.
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None of those are mixed metaphors. For metaphors to be mixed they need to create a confusion by comparing two incomparable things. In these cases they aren't comparing anything. E.g. "paints a picture" is a metaphor for describing something. "world hollowed" is a metaphor for destroying something. You absolutely can described how something is destroyed.
In college I learned not to mix metaphors, but at no point was that boiled down to an idiots guide of "limit it to one per sentence". It's more complicated t
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Also your comment about wordcount is rubbish. The metaphors in this case have no impact on word count
The point about wordcount is a disjointed point. It's not related to mixed metaphors.
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Then why make it? Maybe someone should have paid more attention in English.
Apathy and convenience rule (Score:3)
Legislation will never catch it, nor will it be enacted, as legislators seem to like it, or simply don't understand it.
Only market forces can stop it. Decreased productivity and a rejection by business or the inability of Big Brains to pay their debts could burst the bubble, but otherwise we're just going to have to accept the race to the bottom
The proper use of AI is to... (Score:2)
...do stuff we can't do in science, engineering, medicine and maybe even economics and policy making
We already have writers, actors and musicians who do their job perfectly
I suspect than an AI might write superior technical documentation, but storytelling is something we should keep to ourselves
Artists see this clearly
Profit addicted trendmongers have a different opinion
...help humans do things better (Score:2)
Yes, left to its own devices AI will produce crap (as do many humans!). However, AI as a tool to help a human write a novel that does not have plot holes a mile wide or a science fiction story that g
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There are also people who can knit perfectly. Still most people wear industrial produced socks. That doesn't stop your grandma from knitting you socks.
I had my AI ready what she wrote.... (Score:3)
I had my AI read what she wrote. It says she is full of shit and resistance is futile.
it's a tool like any other tool (Score:2)
AI is a tool. And like any tool its introduction creates proponents and enemies.
Some might say I'm a semi-professional writer. As in: I make money with things I write. From that perspective, I see both the AI slop and the benefits. I love that AI gives me an on-demand proof-reader. I don't expect it to be anywhere near a professional in that field. But if I want to quickly check a text I wrote for specific things, AI is great, because unlike me it hasn't been over that sentence 20 times already and still pa
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The slop part is like with everything: If you just push a button, you get what you can get by just pushing a button. "Write me a good night story" doesn't put any creativity in and so you won't get any creativity out. It's like pressing play in your CD player, you will always get a track of the current CD and never anything new, because a track number is not creative input. But now put your own lyrics into suno and you get something that's not pre-recorded. The same is true for text and image AI. No good in
AI companies should pay for content (Score:2)
Old man yells at neural networks (Score:1)
Traditional artists are also allowed to use AI. And they have their traditional knowledge in addition, so it's like one person has the knowledge and the supercharged powers to create the greatest art of their life, while the other has the same power but little idea about what they create with it and can merely create a few nice pictures. They still look nice and the person is happy about them, but of course someone who learned artistic skills will do better. Look at much of the AI art, often the light is co
Re: Old man yells at neural networks (Score:3)
It's reasonable to criticize industry and society when they adopt some new technology in the stupidest way possible.
Not all technology should be embraced. And embracing technology simply because it is new without working out the benefits and costs is downright foolhardy.
If someone invented suicide booths, and a public outcry came out saying that we don't want this or need this. There would inevitably be someone who would call us Luddites for not embracing progress.
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Not all technology should be embraced, but one would be stupid not to see that generative image, text and video AI should be embraced.
I get it, we all are annoyed by companies putting AI into fucking everything, but that shouldn't make us blind for the use-cases where it is useful.
I asked ChatGPT to finish Winds of Winter (Score:2)
AI is Selling Stolen Work (Score:5, Insightful)