The slow creep of AI slop is unnerving to witness

I’m an editor at this newspaper. Over the past week or so some of our best contributors have filed me AI slop – but not quite how you’d imagine it.

These pieces aren’t necessarily completely written by AI, although sometimes they are. The new frontier is writers using AI to ‘tidy up’ copy.

But this is just as bad as filing complete AI slop. 

When I called out one writer recently, a scribe for national UK newspapers and magazines, they told me they’d used AI for “clarity.”

When I asked what that meant, they said it had cleaned up long sentences by turning them into two shorter sentences, and tightened the messy copy by straightening it out a bit. 

The AI slop has to stop

I was shocked. Surely that’s just… writing?

“Breaking a sentence into two or condensing two sentences into one is quite significant,” I replied diplomatically. “In that it is likely taking away the human element of your sentence construction.”

What I was actually thinking was: what is the point in all of this? Journalists, especially lifestyle journalists, don’t earn a fortune. No one is doing this job for the monthly take home. Don’t they love writing like I do? Isn’t that the payoff, the expressive part we’re all here for?

This week two other writers told me they’d been ‘tidying up’ copy before filing it. They hadn’t written that piece using AI, they said. They had just used it to get inspiration for a section, or had AI write parts for them in drafts.

Using AI to ‘tidy up’ copy has an arguably more insidious effect than using it outright to write an article. That is clearly unacceptable and will be called out, now that tools like Pangram are providing industry-leading technology for checking articles for AI. 

AI slop disrespects editors

Firstly, ‘tidying up’ is a cowardly and reductive phrase that dilutes and minimises the damage being done. Secondly, it implies the presence of real writing, but actually the computer’s intention is to take the humanity out of a person’s work.

Whether this is the writer’s goal or whether they are a small impressionable cog in the AI machine is a bigger question. 

But it seems logical to say that the more someone relies on ‘tidying up’ their writing, the less hard they’ll try to write well in the first place. And by osmosis, the less well they’ll write.

This is clearly a slippery slope. The hardest part: where do you draw the line? How much interference is “okay” for one newspaper versus not okay for another?

My line is zero tolerance: you can use AI to fact check articles but beyond that everything must be human. Otherwise it’s just too easy for a small tweak to become a slightly bigger one and for the human voice to be lost.

A hard line needs to be taken whether you work in journalism, advertising or content marketing. No “just” this or “just” that: no AI interference at all.

The insidious creep

Whoever’s in control – the robot or the human – the most depressing part is that it feels like some of our writers are lying to us. Two this week said they’d accidentally filed press releases rather than their articles, and those press releases must have been written by AI.

Maybe. But it seems like a stretch. Of course, to some extent, the writers are just products of a bigger system, feeling ashamed now that I have called them out. I’m not trying to place blame on any individuals, more do a rallying call to all freelancers to avoid the temptation.

So many shockingly big industry names are succumbing, though, and they should be called out for it. 

Editors like me are also paid to chop writing into shape from freelancers – it is our job to literally “tidy up” your work, so why not respect us and let us do our jobs without getting AI to do it for us?

Only a year ago none of this would have felt possible. Writers would be submitting work they’d written themselves without giving a passing thought to AI. But now that technology exists, it is terrifying (and depressing) to see how many talented writers are quickly exploiting it.