on Writers Helping Writers:

Use context to deepen our writing from AI slop

For as long as I’ve been a writer, I’ve heard the advice, “Only write if you can’t not write.” The idea behind that tough-love guidance is that writing can be ridiculously hard work, publishing can be even harder, and that most published authors won’t make enough money to justify all that effort, so don’t start down this career path unless you can’t imagine any other journey. This advice is even more timely given that we’re now in competition with stories “written” by generative artificial intelligence, often called AI slop.

The overwhelming number of books on Amazon has ballooned with several get-rich-quick schemes over the decades, from publishing fanfic and using ghostwriters to the current explosion that uses AI to Frankenstein a story mimicking the pirated books it’s been trained on.