The AI poem you love is still slop
why authorship is essential to human expression — especially as AI gets good
If a poem makes you laugh or touches your soul, does it matter if a machine wrote it?
This question’s been gnawing at me since I read a Nature study from last November.1 Readers were asked to evaluate a set of poems — some written by famous human poets, others by AI. The results were unsettling: readers were more likely to believe the AI-generated poems were human than the human-authored ones. Worse, they preferred them.
The study rattled me because it points to a dilemma that has the potential to shatter the arts and humanities as we know it: What happens when AI simulates human expression better than we do, at the push of a button? What if we prefer the AI content just as participants in the study did?
There’s a lot of talk about slop in today’s discourse about culture and media, but it’s missing a crucial element: authorship.
Today, slop is used as a shorthand for shallow, low-quality content, whether it’s produced by humans or AI. Tools like ChatGPT have made it effortless to crank out crappy content, and a tsunami of it has washed over the Internet recently. Human slop exists too — think: spam, troll farms, low-effort essays. But the sheer volume of AI content is the main reason for all the slop talk.
Yes, low-quality content is a real issue. But the harder and more urgent question is: What happens when AI content gets good — like really good? Is quality AI content still slop? Or, to put a finer point on it: Should we consider the AI poems from the Nature study slop, even though they were so good that humans preferred them?
I’ve been debating this in my head for the last week and have concluded: Yes, those poems are slop. Because they lack authorship. They weren’t expressions of a human being. They didn’t come from anyone’s consciousness, experience, or soul. They were simulations pretending to be real. On some level, they were a mockery of human expression — soulless simulacra.
Yes: Quality slop is still slop.
Authorship is the act of shaping and owning an expression, thought, or truth. It matters because it’s the line separating creation and simulation, and the connective tissue between humans and the humanities. In an age of synthetic intelligence, authorship is what preserves human agency. It’s how we hold the line against total AI domination.
Of course, not all content needs the beating heart and fleshy thumbs of authorship. If I’m reading a stock report or a weather forecast, I don’t care who wrote it. I just want them to be accurate and helpful. But personal expression is different. People don’t value poems, art, or personal essays because they’re useful. We value them because they move us. They make us feel connected to the human condition and the texture of human life. AI might write something as good as Catcher in the Rye. But if I found out it was machine-made after the fact, I’d feel cheated. It would be like having sex with someone only to find out afterward that they’re a robot. No matter how technically good it was, something essential would feel violated.
But what if the people in the Nature study knew the poems were AI-generated and still preferred them? Or, what if I knowingly read an AI-generated Catcher in the Rye clone and still liked it? If no one’s being deceived, maybe that would be fine. Maybe it would just be entertainment. But it also deepens the dilemma. What does it say about us — and me — if we willingly prefer the imitation of human expression more than the real thing?
In this way, quality slop poses a deeper threat to human civilization than the low-grade content everyone whines about. Low-quality slop is annoying but easy to dismiss. High-quality slop has the potential to deceive us. To seduce us. To disconnect us from genuine, messy, authentic human expression.
Some may read this and think I’m anti-AI, but that’s not what this is about. I like AI. I sometimes use ChatGPT myself for editing, word choice, and title ideas. Hell, I used it for this essay.
My exhortation is not to avoid AI but to preserve authorship, regardless of the creative tools one uses. And my authorship litmus test comes down to this: Is a tool like AI helping me say something more true and authentic, or is it flattening what I want to say into something toothless, generic, or fake? Is AI sharpening my expression or replacing it?
Take Catcher in the Rye again. What if Salinger had used AI to help outline and edit the book, but the emotional core and story were still his? I might view the book differently, but it wouldn’t necessarily be slop. It would still be his work, just with better tools. Holden Caulfield would still be fully his. We might even ask, provocatively: Why wouldn’t a contemporary Salinger use AI? Some may clutch their pearls, understandably. But what matters more than his tools is that his authorship is intact — or even enhanced.
I suspect there’s a creeping anxiety and looming inferiority complex behind slop discourse. It’s not just that AI may flood the zone but that it could outshine us. It’s really freakin’ humbling that, with the right prompt, ChatGPT can generate an essay in seconds that’s 90% as good as one that takes me hours and sometimes weeks to write. There are times when I’ve been tempted to surrender completely to AI, to give up on writing altogether or to lean on it more than I should. But I fight this impulse because I want my expression to remain mine. I don’t want to outsource my soul or silence it. I see a “slop singularity” on the horizon — a point where AI content becomes so good, prolific, and easy to produce that it drowns out human expression. And I am standing athwart it yelling: HANG ON TO YOUR AUTHORSHIP!!! I’m saying it to myself as much as to you.
In a recent exchange online, I asked what the opposite of slop is. One reader replied: craftsmanship.2 It’s a fantastic answer. But for me, the deeper answer is authorship. The concepts are related. Craftsmanship is about how something is made, while authorship is about who made it and whether it carries their voice, intent, and soul. Both matter. But while craftsmanship implies authorship, authorship doesn’t necessitate the purity of craftsmanship. Authorship doesn’t mean you have to create your content a certain way. It means the work remains yours. It means it bears your truth. Ultimately, authorship is what separates expression from slop, not the specific tactics of how it is produced.
A classmate of mine, now a teacher at our alma mater in Oregon, recently asked what I’d advice I’d give her students about AI. I’ve been sitting with this question, and I would share this:
Use AI if you want, but never surrender your authorship.
Keep humans on top and AI on tap.
As AI continues to improve, now’s the time to hold tight to flawed, awkward, beautiful human expression — not because it’s technically superior but because it’s real. I don’t pin my kid’s drawing on the fridge because it’s a masterpiece. I pin it up because he made it. No machine can replicate that.
A world of high-quality simulacra is upon us. Genuine human expression will become harder to spot, yet more sacred than ever. We should resist the temptation to prefer machine-made poems over real ones. Quality slop is the most dangerous kind. Because if we lose sight of authorship, we risk losing touch with our own humanity.
Shout out to
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I think there’s is a really important need for a tool, even if it’s another AI, that is able to accurately tell if a piece is AI written. Could lead to a new sort of copyright, a “human generated” label.
Your first sentence has me wondering, how do you feel about AI summarizing your emails (which means they can be categorized and analyzed)? The answer is it's intrusive. I hate it. Not as paranoid as I was when I first saw it, but I digress.
The real question about AI generated poems, which is art, is if it will receive the same Constitutional protections as other literature? What happens when AI generated art offends?