> We really need more terms for AI-assisted writing.

I actually think we need less discernment. All AI work is slop, but an enormous amount of human-written work is also slop. I think we need to come to an understanding that we're filling our lives with repetitive, derivative garbage that mostly shouldn't exist. AI is adding to the problem, not causing the problem.

We started deleting all of the good stuff on the internet and replacing it with crap long before LLMs were viable. Too many books are published every year. The biggest sellers are sort of ideal, overengineered, perfect slop that will just get over the bar of acceptability for the widest audience (and be enthusiastically praised by people in the industry whose ideal is perfect, bestselling slop), everybody else sells zilch, if they can find a publisher. Consolidation (media deregulation and the end of antitrust) has forced everybody to shoot for that widest audience, or cease to exist entirely. People are trained to slop. Slop is a sign of maturity and understanding adult responsibilities. Slop art, slop opinions, slop design, slop world.

We don't appreciate the good things (or can't even find them), let them be crowded out by slop, and we lose some of them forever every day. AI is an industrial level advance in this process, but it's still human hands letting it loose. Their motives are mortgages, healthcare, not being fired at will, avoiding social rejection, feeding your kids that maybe you'll one day be able to afford to have. You feed that into the market in return for the least amount of security the surveys and equations say that they can possibly give you, and the equity of pigs, born pigs, just rises like a hockey stick. Making slop for the pigs.

I'm sure you can do good things when assisted with AI, or you can trick AI into doing things that are great by themselves. But you've always been able to collage things out of slop, or pick a piece of slop and recontextualize it into something that implies a particular conversation with the context. But denying it's slop is just denial.

Nothing on this list looks appealing outside of the "AI Was Allowed From The Start" section; it all looks like annoying literary pandering. If you need AI to come up with names and change your grammar, you're not a writer who in concerned about writing imo, but about creating product.

I heard once that Peter Straub, a horror writer from the 80s, started his career in that way. He looked at all the bestsellers, found commonalities, such as the types of main characters, the types of conflicts, the genres that were selling (horror was big), the lengths of books, the lengths of chapters, the types of sentences, adjectives, plot arcs and scene descriptions, etc., and engineered a career. That's artistic and inspiring for me, but the art isn't on the paper, it's in the process. A.E. Van Vogt did the same thing in the 50s iirc, and he inspired Philip K. Dick who could slop nonstop without sleeping for days in a Methadrine haze by mixing his own divine inspirations and paranoid hallucinations with Van Vogt's cynical commercial nearly-incompetent dreamlike incoherence. If you use AI to express things that you calculate might be lucrative to feel, you're part of a long slop tradition, maybe you should be proud.

Or maybe you should just render unto the slop machines what now belongs to the slop machines, and work on something else. The slop market is full.