On Slop

There is no such thing as an objective opinion

What is bad writing? I don’t mean bad plotting or badly drawn characters — those I think are easier to define. What makes a sentence bad? What makes someone’s style bad? I think we could throw some things out there to try and answer this, perhaps putting forth the following accusations: repetitive, overly descriptive/purple, passive, show/don’t tell, awkward, flat. I’ll spare you the obvious trick of sharing a Shakespeare/Joyce/Hemingway/Austen, etc., passage for each of these to prove that many we consider great writers have written what would be considered “bad” writing today, but know that I could. Many have put forward AI writing as the sine qua non of bad writing. We’ve all heard this at this point; if a novel contains em dashes, utilizes the rule of threes, or throws out words longer than three syllables, the clarion call of “this is AI” goes up across BookTok, and everyone mans their battle stations. But is AI writing bad? How could it be, when it is merely copying the work of established, lauded (or at the very least widely read) authors? What irony, for authors to be fighting on both fronts — on the one hand, suing OpenAI for allowing ChatGPT to train on their writing, and on the other, fending off accusations from readers that their work is AI. AI is their work.

We’ll get back to AI (how could we stay away?), but I want first to establish why I think the Discourse has become so focused on calling out “bad” writing. I’m being a smidge disengenous to so quickly dismiss plotting or character development as elements of bad writing because when people call writing bad, I do think that’s also what they mean. In researching this piece, I found a thread attempting to answer this question on Reddit, and one of the pieces of somewhat general consensus was that writing is bad if it “fails to achieve its purpose.” This begs some obvious questions — what is the purpose of any given piece of writing? Do we always clearly know the author’s intentions? Do they? Are some “purposes” more worthy than others? But I don’t absolutely hate this definition of good writing, with the key exception that it removes subjective experience from the equation. We are none of us Calliope, muse of storytelling, epic tales, and eloquent speech, floating above the scene and bestowing favor upon books that have “achieved their purpose.” There is no objectivity in reading, and there never has been. No matter how much time you spent diagramming sentences in high school English, you have no more authority than anyone else to declare something to be objectively good, objectively successful. Even if you are a professional critic, your opinion might be more informed than the average bear, but it is not a more valid or correct opinion for being so. We should value the knowledge, skill, and experience behind an opinion, but art is not math; there is no right answer to any of our questions here. But to the Discourse, this is too destabilizing to be permitted.

The late capitalist drive to curate an artisanal reading experience has made the culture around writing and reading far worse. Every sentence must be locally sourced and lovingly handcrafted. Every character must be ethical; every sinner must be punished. There must be an appropriate balance of LGBTQ and BIPOC characters, but only in carefully circumscribed roles depending on the author’s own identity (which they must disclose). The author’s views, social, political, anthropological, pop cultural, and international must be perfectly aligned with those of the reader, or they’re “problematic” and should be added to a running List of Bad Writers whose badness makes their writing bad.

Not to blow anyone’s mind, but I think the philosopher Immanuel Kant is a really bad writer. His writing is virtually incomprehensible to me. I do not think that it accomplishes its goal, if its goal was to communicate philosophical ideas. I was told in many classes that I just had to study him and pick him apart to truly understand that his writing wasn’t randomly obtuse but deliberately so, a puzzle to be unpuzzled by the worthy. I don’t think that’s true; I think he was just really bad at writing. The itch to feel superior about this take lives deep within my heart (and within this Reddit thread). I can’t possibly say it better than this anonymous Redditor,

It's funny, because in the preface to the first Critique Kant talks a little bit about this. He admits he's not a great writer - seriously, it's right there, in the preface (to the second edition, I believe). And he also talks about how the book will be difficult to understand, by its very nature, and that sometimes, counterintuitively, things are clearer if they're not very clear, and books can be shorter if they're not that short. And so he had to make the book long and a little less clear than he could have been.

Yet how can I then argue he hasn’t achieved his purpose? How can I argue that one of the most lauded philosophers in history is bad at writing? Maybe he’s better in the original German. Maybe he’d be better if I put him into ChatGPT and said, “Please simplify for me.” But what he wouldn’t be is himself, and at the end of this little rant, that is what I think is most important. Books are not bad or good. They are themselves, fully formed entities that have departed the loving arms of their creators and sailed like paper boats into our personal harbors. They may work for you, they may be for you in some deep mystical sense, or they may not. It is not your personal responsibility to call out what doesn’t fit your vision of good taste, to write a thousand words on Goodreads about why a book is unredeemable slop and an offense against the English language.

At the end of the day, this all lives under the ancient concept of Taste. We have never been able to kill the idea that we humans can acquire the sophistication to tell the good from the bad and the financial power to acquire only the good — only the best. Is that not the tasteful way to justify the acquisition of wealth? I want to be wealthy so I can afford hand-stitched leather bags and farm-to-table meals that perfectly hit my macros and skincare that allows me to age elegantly and silk pillows that keep my hair smooth and the ability to donate to the right candidates and hand-poured candles and electric cars that purr and the right school district and to never have to eat a slop bowl again (as if having your lunch handmade for you with fresh, healthy ingredients that are slightly less good and slightly more expensive than they were five years ago is the bellweather of the decline and fall of civilization. A champagne problem if there ever was one).

I understand we all feel that everything is getting more expensive and worse; it’s the enshitiffication narrative writ large across every facet of modern life. The drive to establish and hotly defend artistic taste is bound up in this same fear of erosion. Our Netflix movies are too formulaic, our books are too horny, our salads don’t have the best kale anymore. But I beg everyone to zoom out a bit. Taste has always and will always be an expression of power. Those in power set the standard for taste, whether that’s powdered wigs and enameled snuff boxes (that, if sold, could feed a family of four for a year) or dewy, clean girl skin and Berkins (ditto). Taste has always included an appropriate mix of what’s deemed “high” and “low” — it’s not all Michelin stars and Sally Rooney — but that mix and what’s deemed as such is set by those with a voice. It is set by those in power, and there is no more objective truth to be found in their pronouncements than in yours or mine or any other random opinion-haver. I’m sorry to leave us mired in artistic relativism, but it is in that chaotic discomfort we must learn to live. Without it, we would just have boring Soviet propagandart and our souls would be the poorer.

And thus, back to AI (a neater transition I couldn’t have planned). Art is not bad because it is AI-generated. It just isn’t art. Art must be made by human brains and human souls, whatever the medium. I am not naive about humanity; I am sure that some novels are being AI-generated and will continue to be. Until a reliable form of determining AI content is developed, some people will try to publish AI-generated books. Until then, the accusations are irresponsible and “problematic.” As it turns out, those most likely to be accused of using AI in their writing are neurodivergent people and those whose first language is other than English; this is borne out in my own anecdata — BookTok has had an unfortunate tendency to lob these accusations at people of color, and apparently so do teachers. Our witchhunt-y tendency to play detective, to slither over every sentence, counting to some number of em-dashes that will justify our “J’accuse!” is coming from our fears. We are afraid of change, of human ingenuity being devalued, of a world in which everything costs more and tastes worse forever until we’re just eating ground cockroach blocks on the back of Snowpiercer. These fears are understandable; our response to them still must be better. If we truly want to curate an ethical artistic experience, we could focus more on understanding the pushes and the pulls on us, the reasoning behind why some books are published and some aren’t, the incredibly onerous workload editors are struggling under, the way the algorithm spins us up and sends us out to collide with each other. We could try to understand that authors don’t owe us their personal biographies, much less their political opinions or sexual orientation. We could learn to judge strangers less. We could learn to keep more of our opinions to ourselves.