{"id":2384,"date":"2026-02-18T07:11:57","date_gmt":"2026-02-17T18:11:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/?p=2384"},"modified":"2026-03-30T08:19:24","modified_gmt":"2026-03-29T19:19:24","slug":"why-ai-slop-should-make-you-a-reviewer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/2026\/02\/18\/why-ai-slop-should-make-you-a-reviewer\/","title":{"rendered":"Why AI Slop Should Make You a Reviewer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is a follow-up to my previous post, AI Slop: A Perspective<\/a>. Both of them are mostly me thinking aloud about the issues. I\u2019m not an expert on AI (though I have a close friend who is, and who has helped me considerably with both technical advice and personal perspectives). I do know a decent amount about novels, having read and reviewed more than a thousand of them<\/a> just since 2014, when I started reviewing everything I read, and I\u2019ve published sixteen of my own and spent a good deal of time thinking about the craft of creating them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This post is one novelist and reviewer\u2019s take on the current state of AI as at February 2026, especially as it applies to the idea of using AI to write novels (or create art in general), and ends with a realistic suggestion of what you personally might do about it all. It\u2019s a field which is constantly and rapidly changing, and even if I present insights that are true today, they may not continue to be true. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

AI and Me<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s start with some background on my current use of AI, which is minimal, and why I don\u2019t use it more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I use AI at work sometimes (my day job is in technology), almost entirely to save time when I\u2019m trying to figure out what mistake I\u2019ve made in some code or an Excel formula. I\u2019ve never used it to write, and don\u2019t intend to, but I have used it for cover art once, on my most recently published novel. I made that decision because I knew I wasn\u2019t going to sell many copies, and the guy who usually does my covers charges several hundred US dollars that I knew I wouldn\u2019t get back in the near future, if at all. To be clear, his covers are great, and he absolutely charges a fair price for them, but I couldn\u2019t justify spending that money in that specific instance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve never felt happy about that decision, and in future I plan to go back to what I\u2019ve done previously for projects that I expect to not be profitable: using GIMP and royalty-free source images. I will probably replace that AI cover when I have time to do so, as well. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve thought about using AI to do the part I don\u2019t enjoy, which is the marketing, but I wouldn\u2019t trust an AI agent with an advertising budget, and there are three reasons I don\u2019t do marketing: because I don\u2019t enjoy it, because I\u2019m bad at it, and because I don\u2019t like the way I have to pay Amazon now to get them to promote my books to people who would enjoy it. I\u2019m stubborn that way, and since I have a day job and don\u2019t have to make a living out of my writing, or indeed any money at all, I can afford to stand on principle and sell fewer books as a result. Other people are not so fortunate, and have to work with the market they have, not the market they wish they had. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So why am I not using AI? My concerns are these: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. Environmental impact. The nature of how AI works means it needs large datacentres that need a lot of power and then a lot of cooling as the chips heat up, to prevent them from melting themselves down, and both of these things have an environmental impact. This, of all times, is not the moment to be having that! This by itself should mean we don\u2019t support the widespread use of AI!

    AI datacentres<\/a>, specifically, use a lot of power and water, for technical reasons to do with the amount of computing power being applied. I\u2019m told that an AI query uses about three times the energy of a Google search query.

    Sure, maybe fusion power is coming (it has been for decades, though it\u2019s seeming closer than ever to actually happening), but even if you\u2019re generating effectively unlimited power cheaply and cleanly – and, as yet, we\u2019re not – the waste heat still has to go somewhere, and you still need a lot of water to do the cooling, and clean water is a scarce resource that actual people need in order to live, and that is made into not-clean water (and often evaporated entirely) by the cooling process. Yes, you could power the datacentres with renewables, which have no net heat effect, since the generation takes heat out of the environment in order to turn it into power. Yes, you could heat homes with the waste heat; it\u2019s being done in Scandinavia. Yes, you could recycle the water, though it makes the cooling more costly. There are mitigations that can be put in place. But they\u2019re mostly not in place yet, largely because most AI datacentres are in the US, where regulations don\u2019t require the mitigations and the power generation mix includes a lot of fossil fuels still. This alone makes AI use ethically dubious unless there\u2019s a significant upside that you can\u2019t otherwise get in order to balance the downside. Sometimes there is, but I don\u2019t think generating a cover for my book is one of those times. 
    <\/li>
  2. Wholesale piracy of intellectual property. It\u2019s quite likely that Meta\u2019s AI has been trained on pirated copies of several of my books, along with thousands of others that they could certainly have afforded to pay for. I\u2019m not going to go into the argument about how the collective creative output of humanity up until now is inherently the source for any new creativity, and therefore the AI trainers were engaging in \u201cfair use\u201d when they used copyright works; I don\u2019t agree with it, but I\u2019m not going to die on that hill. I do resent the outright piracy, though.
    <\/li>
  3. I don\u2019t trust big tech companies to behave ethically in any way unless it happens to coincide with what will get them the most profit, and I think their record bears me out here. Social media was honestly never great, and is now thoroughly awful thanks to profit-led decisions by the exact people who are developing AI, or people who are very like them. AI has the potential to be even more awful, and I don\u2019t want to be locked into it when that happens.

    Anthropic does seem to be trying harder than the other companies not to be evil, but we saw how it went when Google announced that as a goal. And they\u2019ve settled for over a billion dollars with some authors whose books they pirated.
    <\/li>
  4. The development issue I mentioned in my earlier article<\/a> – fewer people being willing to make things that AI could currently make better than them, in order to learn how to do it and eventually reach the point where they can make things that AI could never make. That\u2019s a big problem for humanity, which is already affecting real people (junior developers, who are finding it hard to get work that would eventually turn them into senior developers, who in turn are, despite the hype of some AI moguls, still people we very much need). <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    The Work of Art<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    But maybe a lot of people would never get good enough to make things an AI couldn\u2019t make? Most people have average ability or close to it, after all. The thing is, in writing as in anything else, you level up by grinding<\/a>, so even if you start out average, if you want to be above average and have any potential to be so, you will have to work at it. I linked in my last post to this video by Brandon Sanderson<\/a> about the exact issue I\u2019m discussing, in which he talks about how, as a young man, he wrote a novel that sucked, knowing it was going to suck, in order to have the experience of writing a novel and learn something from the process. He learned enough that his next novel sucked less. By the time he wrote his sixth novel, it hardly sucked at all, to the point that he was able to get that one published, and he\u2019s gone on getting better since. This is because he thinks about his craft as a craft, and works hard to do it as well as he\u2019s capable of. He\u2019s now very good, and has made a lot of money doing it – which is not an inevitable outcome, nor is it necessarily mainly because he works so hard at his craft, though I\u2019m sure that plays a role.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    There will always be people who enjoy making art for the sake of the process, for the enjoyment of the craft, and that\u2019s not going away. We\u2019re now in the third century of the industrial era, in an age when anything you can imagine can be made by a machine, and plenty of people still make, and buy, handcrafts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Unfortunately, there\u2019s not always a correlation between producing good art and enjoying the process; some good artists hate the process and find it incredibly painful, but go through it anyway because they\u2019re driven to create or for some other reason, like it\u2019s what they\u2019re good at and can make a living doing. One of the fears about AI art is that some of them may not be able to make that living anymore, and then we lose them as artists. Is the gain of having all the AI artists instead worth it to us collectively? What about the impact it has on the humans who aren\u2019t able to make a living making art anymore? What are they going to do instead? In some cases, something they struggle with less, but in other cases, something they struggle with more. And I think the latter will outweigh the former. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    This is far from the first time technology has caused this sort of transition, of course, and the world is somehow still functioning. A century ago, the introduction of recorded music as soundtracks for silent films took work away from a lot of musicians, including my grandmother, who played the piano for the silent movie theatre. She probably didn\u2019t get well paid for it, but with two small boys and her husband employed as an engine driver, any extra would have been welcome. Then there\u2019s the transition from artists grinding their own pigments to buying them from colourmen. I’m sure someone railed against that, but not every process has to be done by hand. Still, that\u2019s not to dismiss genuine concerns about the transition that AI will bring; it will cause, has already caused, real harm to real people, whatever benefits it ends up having in the long term. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    There\u2019s a Venn diagram of art, in which the set of art that shows good craft and the set of art that appeals to a wide audience overlap, but are not by any means identical. Brandon Sanderson\u2019s novels, and a good many other people\u2019s, are in the overlap, but there are ones that gain a wide audience and don\u2019t have good craft (such as Twilight), and ones that have good craft and don\u2019t gain a wide audience, like a lot of the heavier Russian novels, Kafka, or Finnegans Wake. There are various reasons why good art doesn\u2019t get an audience, whether it\u2019s because it\u2019s ahead of its time, difficult, uncomfortable, or just for reasons of discoverability, of which more later. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    Let\u2019s not, by the way, get into the gatekeeping discussion of what is and isn\u2019t art, or at what point it\u2019s so poorly crafted it isn\u2019t art anymore. I\u2019m calling it all art. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    So there\u2019s a parallel discussion to be had about commercialism in art. There are people who are only producing art because they make money at it. There are people who would, perhaps do, pay to make art because they love the process and\/or the product so much. But the art in the middle, that\u2019s produced both because the artist wants to spend time making art and also because they can make some money out of it and so justify, or even just afford, spending that time not doing something else – that\u2019s where the pinch comes if it\u2019s cheap and easy to make poorly-crafted art, some of which is commercial and replaces the work of people who used to make art for a living. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    And there will always be people who, for the sake of making money, will produce something that they don\u2019t care about by a process they also don\u2019t care about, even a process that harms someone else. If that\u2019s easy and has any chance of being profitable (in social capital or actual money, and these days on social media the two are linked), there will be a lot of such people, and most of them will inevitably do it badly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The Dunning-Kruger Effect applies, too: There are people who are bad at art and don’t know it, so they won’t improve. (If you do know you’re currently bad at it, you’re in Brandon Sanderson’s position when he was writing bad novels in order to learn and get better.) AI is an amplifier; if you\u2019re bad at art, you can easily make more bad art than ever before, and you probably won\u2019t even recognize it as bad. The LLM certainly won’t tell you. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    When I use the shorthand word \u201cbad\u201d here, I\u2019m talking about the \u201cpoorly crafted\u201d part of the Venn diagram above. In the case of fiction, I mean that they don\u2019t know the basic mechanics of writing (like grammar, usage and punctuation); don\u2019t understand the world we live in well enough to build a fictional one; don\u2019t know how to create a plot without forcing it along through coincidence or out-of-character choices; can\u2019t write believable or interesting or three-dimensional characters; or don\u2019t express themselves clearly at a sentence level. All these are faults I see abundantly in books I review that are not produced with AI, even though I dodge a lot of worse ones by avoiding unoriginal premises and books with obvious errors in their blurbs. And most of these things, apart from basic mechanics, will not be helped by LLMs in their current state. (Pasting your book into Google Docs, which is free, and following the suggestions will improve your basic mechanics well past the standard I see in many recent books I\u2019ve reviewed, by the way. The suggestions aren\u2019t always correct, but they are often enough correct that on average, following them will improve your document. The spelling and grammar checker is, of course, an LLM.) Not expressing yourself clearly, in particular, is likely to give you an outcome you weren\u2019t looking for if you use an LLM.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Now, maybe a good artist could use AI to amplify their abilities too. Coders who are seeing the most gain are the ones with good engineering discipline<\/a>, who are already used to using precise language (code) to make it clear what they want. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    But see my concerns above, which hold me back from experimenting in that direction – even if the creative writing field of which I\u2019m part didn\u2019t have rules against using generative AI for things like short stories to be published in the major magazines. I could do it for my self-published novels, because honestly if people shun me for it I\u2019ll hardly notice the difference, but, again – concerns. And even if those concerns didn\u2019t exist, I don\u2019t really see where the effort I would put in learning to use the tools would gain me anything I valued. I enjoy the process of writing; that\u2019s largely why I do it. There aren\u2019t parts of it I want done for me. I even enjoy the sanding<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Not to mention that, in the US at least, there is no copyright protection for AI-generated works. Copyright requires a human creator, and even if you have done part of the work, copyright legally only applies to the part you did. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I have thought about converting my book The Well-Presented Manuscript<\/em><\/a>, and the various craft posts I have here on my blog, into an AI tutor or coach for human writers, to help them get better quicker. It\u2019s all my own IP, after all, and I can do what I want with it. But my other concerns about AI are too strong; it would directly compete with human editors; and besides, I don\u2019t have the time. Building a tool like that is very time-consuming, contrary to the popular conception of how easy it is to create useful things with AI. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I don\u2019t know if that will continue to be my position. Maybe I will try it someday; maybe my concerns will be mitigated, or there\u2019ll be a use case that\u2019s compelling enough for me to overcome them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    In the meantime, don\u2019t expect me to talk a whole lot more about AI after this post, because as someone who deliberately doesn\u2019t use it I\u2019m in no position to talk about it from the inside. I can talk about art, and speculate on AI\u2019s impact on art, but the technology itself is something I\u2019m not an expert on, and can\u2019t become an expert on without immersing myself in it. I will be using more AI at work this year, mostly in the form of machine learning rather than LLMs, and if I learn anything I think is relevant to writing, I may post about it. We\u2019ll see. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Slop-pocalypse?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    So, the ease of making AI art could lead to a slop-pocalypse (more than there is already), though there are limitations on AI that may temper this problem. Most importantly, much of the real cost of operating these machines is currently being borne by venture capitalists in the hope of an eventual payoff, even though there\u2019s no obvious business model; when the business model cuts in and it\u2019s no longer cheap or free, that will drastically diminish the slop (while de-democritising the technology, so once again people who already have lots of resources will be able to do things that people who have fewer resources can\u2019t). It will also, our experience with social media should have taught us, make AI utterly awful, and I think it has more potential to be awful even than social media, unless someone stops it. It\u2019s pretty awful in places already; read up a bit about Grok if you aren\u2019t already aware. My friend who I mentioned above is working on the governance side of AI, trying to be one of the people who stop it being awful, and I\u2019m glad that\u2019s happening, rather than just – as with social media – leaving it to people to sue after the harm has already been done. There are some very predictable harms that AI can produce and is, in some cases, already producing, and unless we collectively decide they\u2019re not acceptable, we are going to have to live with them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    On the other hand, \u201cslop-pocalypse\u201d is probably too alarmist. Every new technology, and art form, has been condemned when it appears. Socrates feared that writing would harm human memory. Prose fiction, largely written by women, looked like a terrible, civilisation-ending thing in an age used to epic poetry by men. Yes, there will be negative impacts of AI. No, it isn\u2019t going to destroy human writing, or human creativity. We\u2019ve had electronic instruments for years that mimic the sound of a real instrument near-perfectly. People still play real instruments. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    A few years ago, when indie fiction became a thing, the term \u201ctsunami of crap\u201d was bandied about a lot by people who feared that it would mean the end of publishing. And it did make discoverability harder, and there is a lot more bad writing available now. At least some of it sells, too, because, as I\u2019ve noted, there is a difference between executing something well in a craft sense and making that something somehow appealing to consumers; this difference exists throughout the market, in traditional as well as indie publishing, of course. Ninety percent of everything is crap, and \u201ceverything\u201d definitely includes traditional publishing, though the exact percentage may vary locally. What the so-called \u201ctsunami of crap\u201d didn\u2019t mean was that there was no good indie writing produced, or no good writing produced at all. But it does make it harder to find, and so does the slop-pocalypse (so called). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    So if discoverability is a problem, we owe it to each other to help discover good stuff – that\u2019s partly why I review. Review books you like, especially obscure ones! Follow people who review things you like so you can find other things you like! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Of course, you\u2019ll need to watch out for AI reviewers. I got five friend requests in a single day on my Goodreads profile<\/a> recently, which is unusual, and when I looked at them, all five had profile pictures that had clearly been generated the same way, several of them were “friends” of each other, and they\u2019d all reviewed the same three books, including one that I\u2019d reviewed – hence, presumably, the friend request, to make them look more legit. The reviews all had that hard-to-define but easy-to-recognise smell of LLM. I reported them as review-farming bots, naturally. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    But\u2026 find someone you\u2019re confident is a person, follow their reviews, and get the books they recommend that sound like your thing. And then review them for someone else to find. We humans need to stick together. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    This is a follow-up to my previous post, AI Slop: A Perspective. Both of them are mostly me thinking aloud about the issues. I\u2019m not an expert on AI (though I have a close friend who is, and who has … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[8,7],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2384"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2384"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2400,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2384\/revisions\/2400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csidemedia.com\/gryphonclerks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}