Larry M. Coleman

I got to the gym last night and saw this:

The most annoying thing about this is that it wasn’t announced earlier so I could have gone straight to another location, but the second most annoying thing is that it was obviously made through a “make me a sign that says we’re going to be closed from 8/23-9/5” prompt and then, like most slop people generate through AI, never proofread or quality-controlled in the slightest.

• Temporanly closed?
• We lookrord to?
• “Due to remodeling” instead of “For remodeling.” An educated speaker of English would use “due to” for something unanticipated (“Closed due to power outage”) and “for” when it’s something scheduled ahead of time, such as remodeling. It’s one of those grammatical rules you absorb through a ton of reading rather than one you were taught in elementary school.
• The logo at the top is what AI would consider close enough, even though the franchise’s logo faces the other direction and is much more stylized. Almost the only thing the AI got right was the color.

This is why, as an author, generative AI is a burden, not a blessing. It’s a burden because it allows people to create egregiously low-quality content instantly, then throw it out on the market, flooding everything and making it harder to be seen.

The downside is that generative AI makes it harder to get discovered amongst the ever-rising level of scum growing in the creative pool. However, there’s an upside: since almost all AI slop is slop because its “creator” (perhaps a better word is “instigator”) taps a few keys and then never looks at it—or if they do, they lack the skill to understand how massively bad it is because of their overreliance on something else to do the thinking—writing that is original and well-crafted becomes more valuable. Once it’s discovered, people will tell other people about it. That part is no different than it’s always been: there has always been a froth of great writing floating at the top of the surface, even when the trash was written by hand.

Generative AI doesn’t teach people to write any more than riding 26 miles in a car trains one to run a marathon. Writing a lot and reading a lot is the only way to learn the craft, just as lacing up the shoes is the only way to become an actual runner. But if you do learn how to do it well, your writing will stand out even more than it used to.

Go do it, and do it well.