Let Them Eat Slop

i'm so tired of talking about AI

I’ll admit, until this past year or so, I was naive about generative AI. I didn’t really know what it was or how it was being used. I did not understand that when someone posed a question on the clock app or Threads and started it with “Chat…” they were referring to ChatGPT and not, you know, all of us watching. I thought it was some Gen Z internet slang I was just too Old™ to understand.

I had no idea it was capable of generating entire texts or that people were using “Chat” as their therapists. I mostly saw the stupid AI photos popping up on Facebook and remember, at first, feeling deeply sad for artists. Then, once I learned more about the environmental implications and then that intellectual property was used without consent to train them, I felt deep disgust.

But! Everyone was having so much fun! “Chat” was like, no big deal! And you were a total weirdo who was going to get left behind if you didn’t use it! C’mon!

Yet there I was, as always, feeling like Kat Stratford, wondering why everyone was so easily entertained.

me (& kat stratford, probably): your chatgpt pictures and flyers look stupid, and not even in an interesting way. imagine sacrificing the environment, originality, and basic visual taste just to prove you know how to follow the most boring trend alive.

Anyway, I have two stories with a point at the end. Trust me.

A couple weeks ago, I was at the Minnesota Yacht Club Festival, a concert series held on Harriet Island in Saint Paul. The headliner that night was The Strokes, but there were incredible artists earlier in the day too, like Passion Pit, Atmosphere, Cage the Elephant, and more.

It was in the mid-90s, and Minnesota is humid, so it was extra hot. The Strokes were set to go on at 9 p.m., which is a lot of day for people to drink their fill of alcohol and not enough water. The band ended up going on ten minutes late, the only act of the entire three-day festival to not start promptly at set time. They were scheduled to play until the 10:30 p.m. citywide curfew, but they finished at 10:15, which would have allowed time for a short encore.

Well, The Strokes did not come back for an encore. Instead, the show ended fifteen minutes early.

The next day, social media comments were flooded with people voicing their disappointment.

“They started ten minutes late AND finished fifteen minutes early!”

“Fuck The Strokes!”

“What trash! Respect your fans!”

Later, it was revealed that they started late because someone in the pit had passed out and needed to be evacuated by the medical staff, so the band couldn’t begin on time. They also didn’t come back for an encore because people in the VIP section kept throwing light-up balls and rubber ducks onto the stage, hitting guitarist Albert Hammond Jr. multiple times. Not to mention, it was their fourth show within four days and had more shows the following week.

*I, personally, had a fantastic time. They sounded amazing, played a ton of bangers, and I danced like the eighteen-year-old who fell in love with them, not the forty-year-old with kids waiting for her to get home after the show. I was grateful for the opportunity to hear old and new favorites and just take in their artistry.

A couple days before the show, Rebecca Yarros, author of The Empyrean Series, announced a new book: Threshing Day, a collection of short stories centered on various characters’ Threshing Days and how they bonded with their dragons.

Before the announcement, Yarros had made it very clear, multiple times, that she was not announcing Book 4 in the Empyrean series. People are desperate for Book 4. I get it. But despite that very clear messaging, her announcement was immediately flooded with complaints and demands for the next installment. Some “fans” even claimed the author was exploiting them for a quick money grab.

What these people are demanding of her shows how little they understand what goes into writing a book, and a fantasy-based installment at that. And honestly, Yarros’s publishing schedule is insane. She released Fourth Wing in April 2023, Iron Flame in November 2023, and Onyx Storm in January 2025.

And the common denominator with both of those instances is entitlement. And it is absolutely that very entitlement at the center of the rise in usage of Gen AI, especially in creative spaces.

Society does not respect artists nor what it takes to build something worth coming back to time and again.

Many people believe that if they simply have an idea for a book, but not the craft, patience, or desire to sit inside the actual work of writing it, they are entitled to use AI to generate that book for them. They see creation as a commodity and do not respect the creative process in the slightest. i.e.- the labor, the practice, the years of failure, the obsession, the blood, sweat, and tears authors pour into their work.

And as we’ve come to see, what they’re generating is not good. Just like the flyers, the weird photos, all this “work” they’re creating is off-putting and uniform and uninteresting, empty.

αȥɨα 🏹🪽@aziaarcher

(if you can’t create it without ai— you’re creating outside of your calling)

3:52 PM · Feb 16, 2025 · 392 Views

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4 Reposts · 8 Likes

I’ve said in the past that I felt I wasn’t familiar with AI writing, and I believed that to be true for a long time. I’m not on LinkedIn, which is apparently the cesspool of it, and the novels I read and the submissions I receive at Root Smoke have all had soul in the artistry. I wasn’t expecting to see it and wasn’t looking for it either.

So, when I started seeing things like em-dashes, the rule of three, and certain words (hum, quiet, soft) being sold as AI “tells,” I didn’t take many of the rising accusations very seriously. As a poet, those are words and rhythms I know intimately. They have been around forever. AI was trained on human writing. Of course it echoes the way humans write.

But then I started to notice it. Especially on Threads, in those long, multi-post stories that unfold with the same rhythm, the same words, the same phrases, the same emotional beats arranged in the same order and my eyes instantly glaze over in the same way and I can’t finish whatever it is.

Or I’ll look over a company website and realize the copy sounds generic and boring in the exact same way these flyers look generic and boring, despite being FULL OF SO MANY WORDS.

And that’s when I realized, shit, I can recognize it! I just haven’t been exposed to much of it in my favorite reading spaces, thankfully.

Then there’s the Substack merger with Pangram, (which many people have already written about at length and why this is problematic, so I won’t talk about it here), along with the ongoing news cycle of book deals being pulled over AI accusations. And honestly, I’m just fatigued at this point.

I’m fatigued by AI. I’m fatigued by the discourse around AI. I’m fatigued by the way it has made everyone in our community suspicious of everyone else, while somehow doing almost nothing to slow the people that are actually using it to churn out their hollow, soulless, boring content.

I’ve realized that between society’s entitlement to the work of artists and the way generative AI is being shoved down our throats everywhere, I’m at the point where, as a writer especially, I’m like, fuck it!

Let them eat slop!

Let’s see where everyone is in two years, five even, when all their flyers and books and shows and businesses and articles are pouring out the same garbage full of nothingness. Nothing new. Nothing alive. Let’s see how happy they are then.

Because people will not buy into it for long.

Just like no one spends money at craft fairs anymore because every other table is full of 3D-printed garbage no one asked for, the same thing will happen with AI. The human creative spirit will always prevail in the end.

It’s just too bad that by the time the slop pops, we might not be able to reverse the damage done to the environment or the effects and slowing of the minds, the inability to think for ourselves or the probable surveillance state all these data centers will have put in place….

But ya know, at least some folks got to pretend to be creative and hardworking for a season, yeah? How fun for them.

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Azia Archer is a writer and artist living in Minnesota, USA. She is the author of Atoms and Evers (dancinggirlpress) and is currently querying her novel, Small Birds, an upmarket women's fiction novel with light speculative elements. She curates the literary journal Root Smoke on Substack. You can find her online at aziaarcher.com or across social media platforms via @aziaarcher.

What I’m Reading: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders

What I’m Writing: In my journal!

What I’m Listening To: The new album, Reality Awaits, from The Strokes, duh.

What I’m Watching: House of the Dragon. Team Dragons! (Though, ily Daemon. I’m sorry! re: your fate)

Until next time, may your chaos carry light.