What's Worse Than AI Slop? Trad Slop. - by R. J. deGrandpré
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What's Worse Than AI Slop? Trad Slop.<br>If the Work Is So Meh That It Might Be AI, Who Cares How It Was Made?<br>R. J. deGrandpré<br>Aug 16, 2026
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File this one under (1) publishing, and (2) grumpy.
I think almost everyone agrees that publishing is well behind the curve on AI. The recent bad publicity over a debut author losing a multimillion-dollar publishing deal is a case in point. His agents said they could no longer authenticate how the manuscript had evolved, despite having initially accepted his assurances that AI had not been used. In a world where ghostwriters draft whole books with a different name on the cover, some might find this terrifically confusing.<br>Yes, it’s more complicated than that. Or is it?<br>Listening impatiently to fears of a hostile AI takeover of publishing, I was reminded of my one experience along these lines.<br>Last year, I put up a post on Hacker News about a link between a plot in one of my spy novels and recent developments in AI.<br>Some crank immediately commented: “The AI was the author, you didn’t write it. You may have written some extremely clever prompts, but that’s not the same thing.”<br>No, it’s not.<br>Fortunately, I didn’t need to reply. Someone else did: “Just on Chapter 3 but if an AI wrote this we are well and truly fucked.”<br>I was relieved to hear it, and for good reason. If my novels can be confused with AI novels, the problem isn’t AI. It’s me.<br>Or to put it differently: if the novels you write can be written just as well by AI (now or in the very near future), why would you bother? Sailing is a joy, but do you really want to sail across the Channel when the Eurostar will get you there in a couple of hours? Sailing, like the novel, should take you somewhere else—somewhere special.
Of course none of this would matter if fiction today were not so derivative, commodified, and outright boring—like a weak immune system just waiting for the AI virus. Not boring books, necessarily, but a boring array of choices and a cynicism that lets readers wag the dog. Reader numbers and reading habits are not immutable facts of the market. Publishing can shape its own future. It hardly tries, and that’s become pathetic, if not a disgrace.<br>Above I used “hostile takeover” for a reason. Big Five publishing is so busy chasing the debut mega-hit that it's forgotten how it makes its money. By not investing in new authors whose first books fall short of expectations, it is allowing one pillar of its economics to wither: the backlist.<br>The economic engines of trade publishing are essentially frontlist, backlist, and subsidiary rights. The author roster is what makes the first two work over time: publishers invest in authors, build their careers, and turn individual books into durable franchises. Remove that investment and the backlist withers.<br>This lack of investment makes trad particularly vulnerable to a further takeover, this time by indie publishing. In indie, authors make far more per copy, don't have to wait an eternity to see their book appear, and have far more marketing and creative control. The trend of the Big Five buying successful indie books might look like an adaptation to the realities of the marketplace. To me it looks desperate, like a failure to thrive.<br>Meanwhile, as AI threatens the archaic machinery of traditional publishing, indie authors benefit from the editorial and illustration revolution already underway. Developmental editing, line editing, copy editing, and cover design are all now within an author’s reach via AI, at little or no cost and at lightning speeds.
One final point of clarity about all the fear and loathing surrounding the use of AI in fiction.<br>The EU AI Act actually makes some distinctions that apply here. It does not treat every use of AI as though the machine had simply written the work. The rules distinguish AI used for an assistive function in standard editing from AI that generates or substantially alters the work. In other words, there’s a difference between using AI to write a novel and using it to help you edit one.<br>There is no disgrace in using AI for the sort of assistive work editors have always done, sometimes quite extensively.<br>The disgrace is all trad’s. If you want to be angry about AI, be angry about that.<br>Share NOVEL ARCADE
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