Episode 21 - Writing in the age of AI Slop

Personally, I write all my own stuff, always have, always will. But I have to admit —it's already been hard enough to make it in this world as a writer, as the tsunami of AI slop becomes common, authors like myself are going to have an even harder time standing out, and keeping their heads above the slop.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Hey there, welcome to the show. I hope you got a chance to enjoy some of the beautiful sunshine that we had this weekend here in Portland. It was just gorgeous outside. I went for a bike ride around Savi Island over the weekend. And the nice thing about biking is that it's kind of boring. It takes a long time to rack up decent mileage, like to go 30 or 40 miles, it takes a couple hours. And you know, so it's not like jogging where in 20 minutes you're done. It's like you you have some time on your hands, some downtime, and it's uh enough time to get like a little bit bored. And lately that's something that I've been trying to kind of fold into my day a little bit more often, a little bit more on purpose, is that downtime, that kind of like, okay, I'm not in a rush, I'm not being optimized, I'm not trying to be efficient here. So, in case I didn't mention it, uh I'm Anthony Alvarado. The name of this show is The Rough Draft, and yeah, I'm Anthony, and I'm probably best known for writing DIY Magic, which is a book, uh a bit of a cult classic from uh several years back that I wrote about creativity and magic and esoterica, and I feel like it came out kind of right before there was a huge wave of interest in like tarot and astrology and crystal shops on every other street in Portland. But I've been a writer for a long time, and while I'm best known for that book, I've written a lot of other stuff as well that maybe never quite made it to the mainstream publishing. Um, I've written zines and poetry, one act plays, small press short stories, and uh even a book about activism and how to survive the first Trump era, which feels a bit dated now, but when it came out, I think that it was a little bit ahead of its time in talking about like self-care. So, anyhow, yeah, I've been uh writing a lot for quite a while. I mean, I'm working on like this weird idea for like a Western novel right now that I feel like is kind of like my take on what would it look like if Murakami was writing Blood Meridian, is how I've been thinking of it. And I'm having a lot of fun writing it, but I'm also trying to figure out what it means to be a writer, to be an author in 2026 with the advent and onslaught of AI. It's a pretty mind-bending and weird time. And I feel like it might be a bit of a preview of um kind of like you know, AI's coming for everybody's jobs in a way, you know. I think mostly just uh white-collar jobs. Like if your work mostly involves sitting at a computer, yeah, there's gonna be some impact there in the next few years. So that's something that I've been thinking about as a writer and just as like, you know, a a citizen of the world that like you did not ask for this crazy weirdness that we're in the midst of. And you know, it's not all bad, but it's it's strange and it's a surreal time. And I think that the perspective of being somebody who spent their life uh thinking about writing and thinking about how to like be um a wordsmith to to get pretentious, um, it it's it's a strange feeling, you know, to see that. Okay, so AI recently wrote a best-selling novel, right? There, I don't know if you've heard about this, but there's this novel that came out, was a bestseller on the horror thriller list called Shy Girl by Mia Ballard. Turns out it was not really totally by Mia Ballard because everybody agrees, it was large parts of it were written by ChatGPT. And that's a first, but I doubt that will be a last. And you know, I get it. Like the fact is, writing is hard. Writing a book takes an incredible amount of patience and diligence, and it takes a lot of hard work. And if you can easily fake it, get a machine to do your homework for you, well, a lot of people are going to choose that route. Personally, I write all of my own stuff, always have, always will, but I have to admit that it's already getting hard, you know, in a world where it's already hard enough as uh a writer, and any artist is is going to agree with this, or anybody who who's ever had a go of trying to make it in the world of creativity, whether as a writer or a musician or a visual artist, you know how hard it is. And, you know, this AI slop that's going to be coming out more and more in the next few years is is only gonna make it harder for authors like myself to stand out and keep their heads above the flood of slop. So it's something I've been thinking about lately. Uh, and I think that it's really that creatives are uh always just kind of like on the edge of where the ecosystem is going, you know. What what happens, what comes first for the musician and the the visual artist and and the the writer is is going to impact everybody sooner or later. So yeah, uh something I've been kind of like wrestling with a little bit and thinking about like how to continue to be a creative person and and do what I love to do. Um, but and also, you know, like I don't think it necessarily has to all be like dire and bad. You know what I mean? There's also something to be said for the idea of new things waiting to be discovered that nobody's seen yet. You know, think of musicians like like taking the blues and and plugging their guitars into electricity and inventing like a whole new genre, you know. I think there's gonna come a day when some author of the future can learn how to utilize AI in a way that's like not crappy and extractive to create something that's actually like different. And I'm not gonna say better because I think that there's always going to be an audience for non-synthetic, purely human-created content. Uh, I hate the word content, I hate that I said that, but like human-created ideas and and art and voice, you know. But I also think that you would be lying to yourself to not see the tsunami that's coming of change. And we're in the midst of that tsunami. I think it's kind of foolish to try to guess where it's gonna land. I do think it's been oversold, you know, by by a lot, by the tech bros, the the scam altmans of the world that are raising billions of dollars for this this extractive technology. So it's it's a weird time, it's a crazy time, but it's also an interesting time to be somebody who's interested in language, you know, like these machines are literally made out of language, which is like trippy and weird. And yeah, we're we're in the middle of this seismic shift in technology, and it doesn't come along very often. And I I think it's yeah, without trying to predict where it all will land, I think anybody that that does that is lying to you. Like nobody really knows. But I also think that it's not going to be as dire, uh apocalyptic as some people make it out to be, nor is it gonna be as like utopian and like, hey, we're all gonna get universal basic incomes, and it's gonna be like utopian. I think that those two extremes are probably both naive and wrong, and the truth will be something a bit more mixed and a bit more muddled. And I think that it's also kind of like up to us like how do we want to use this technology? How do we want to think about using it? And think about like how much we are going to let it shape us too, you know, like a new technology comes along, TV, radio, video games. You don't have to go all in. I think that the human take, the human response can and should be a little bit like, okay, I want to choose how much I want to be involved with this. I want to choose if I let this thing, you know, to what degree do I want to um utilize this tool? I mean, for my part, I'm loath to let AI like do my actual writing for me. That uh I don't know, that just makes my flesh crawl. But, you know, somebody once said, I write to know what I think. And I think that writing itself is a mode of thinking. Just like drawing does something. Drawing uh with a pencil does something to you. You see in a deeper way than if you just snap a picture on your phone. Uh, the process of writing, I think, is is really important. And I think that it's something that I don't think we want to give up without a fight. As AI is sort of being force-fed into every corner of work and you know, the internet, and now it's on email, like, hey, let AI write this email for you. I think you want to think really carefully about accepting that and about clicking that button. Because I think we all should be thinking about like what does using this tool actually do to me? Like, how do you how does it make you feel? What part of yourself are you giving up or letting go of? And that's not to say that it's simply like AI's bad, you know, it's not reductive. I'm saying pay attention, pay attention to what it feels like to use it or to not use it. And yeah, it's just I think we should all be pretty cautious about what we want to outsource to a machine. Because when you give away your awareness, when you give away your attention, it's hard to get that back once it's gone. Corporations they want you to McDonald's wants you to just eat McDonald's all day. TV wants you to just watch TV all day, and now AI wants you to outsource thinking. Like these tools are made more powerful by the more that we we give to them. But that's um we have the freedom of choice to decide whether or not we do that. All that said, you know, I I make full use of AI for like planning stuff and research and learning about stuff that I'm curious about. It it can be a really great resource for a lot of different things, but um, I also feel like if I give up my right to think for myself, yeah, I I might not get that back. I gave up my right to like navigate around town to Google Maps long ago. And without using that app, I can, you know, have a hard time getting across town and finding my finding the street I'm looking for. You know, a car is is useful, it gets you to a lot of places a lot faster than just walking. But does that mean that a car is inherently better? Well, no, it can't do a lot of things, and there's an appropriate time and place for each. I think that if you only went anywhere by car, uh that would lead to some health issues, you know, if you never walked at all. And the smart approach is to learn how to use the tool, learn to drive the car, but also don't stop walking. In fact, you should protect that, and you'll be glad you did. If you protect that ability, you protect that time, and don't lose it, then you're going to be capable of standing on your own two feet. So, yeah. All right, that's the show for today. Thanks so much for listening. Check out Anthony Alvarado dot net for other episodes and other uh cool stuff. All right, peace.