Art in the Age of Slop

On Romantasy plagiarism, hashtag-tailored books, and why originality is still worth striving for

Chamber of Chills #15, January 1953, art by Al Avison

New year, new literary scandals. This week, Katy Waldman in the New Yorker has an interesting and depressing article about a plagiarism scandal in the Romantasy world. If you’re unfamiliar, Romantasy is the buzzy marketing category that’s more or less what the portmanteau of Romance and Fantasy implies. (Yes, there is monster sex.) Romantasy has existed for a while—remember Twilight?—by concept if not name. In the last couple years, it’s become the marketing category everyone is trying to milk dry following the success of books like The Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros, which had 15 weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list.

If you’ve read my newsletter, you know I’m not a genre snob. I write and read across genres and am sure there are good Romantasy novels out there. But. Whenever a formula makes lots of money, opportunistic writers and publishers scramble to ride the trend. This case centers on Entangled (publisher of The Fourth Wing), whose CEO apparently thinks the problem with literature is there is too much originality. “The problem with traditional publishing is that they just let writers write whatever they want,” Entangled’s CEO Liz Pelletier is quoted as saying, “and they don’t even think about what the TikTok hashtag is going to be.” A few years ago, Entangled hired a writer using the pen name Tracy Wolff to crank out the gargoyle-vampire romance novel Crave. Sequels speedily followed. The problem? Crave bears many similarities—from plot points to identical lines—with an unpublished novel by Lynne Freeman that had been submitted to Entangled by the same literary agent who represents Wolff.

Thought I recognized that cover…

You can read the article for the full story (and read the lawsuit for the fuller story.) I tend to regard plagiarism accusations skeptically, but this one is plausible. The Crave novels were written in what Waldman charitably calls a “collaborative creative process” in which the editor (Abrams), publisher (Pelletier), agent (Kim), and nominal author (Wolff) wrote simultaneously, and it was “hard to tell who added what”:

“Love ‘our tree of trust is just a twig’ did you write that?” Kim texted Pelletier, about a line in “Crush.” Referring to a different line, Pelletier said, “I wrote that sentence, but I was using Tracy’s voice.” And: “I came up with every header but the first chapter lol.” While closing “Court,” which was on a particularly tight schedule, author, editor, and agent supplied sentences and ideas, all of which swirled together in the various documents being updated in tandem on each of their laptops. Pelletier asked Kim, “Tracy wrote that moonstone description?” Kim texted Abrams, “Tracy and I are team speed writing new scenes,” and “I’ve stopped copy editing because I helped write all this.”

Novels composed by four people—three of whom aren’t authors—“speed writing” in such a haste they don’t even remember who added what seems like a place for corner cutting. It’s easy to imagine the agent or publisher grabbing material from an old manuscript while slapping the novels together. Yet there is a solid counter argument implied in the article that might be summed up as “these books are so intentionally generic and imitative that it isn’t even possible to be original.” The goal is to serve up exactly what readers want and expect. Originality hurts sales.

Even knowing how formulaic commercial fiction tends to be, there’s something very sad about collaborative “speed writing” aimed at TikTok hashtags. I couldn’t help but think of Mia Sato’s recent Verge article about Amazon product influencers accusing each other plagiarism. The Amazon influencers create nearly identical “content”… but also the content is inherently bland. The point is to be beige, plain, and do exactly what every other Amazon influencers is doing because that is what works with the algorithm. Even the specific products are picked for the influencers:

[M]any of the products influencers feature in content are pushed at them by Amazon itself. Around sales events like Prime Day or Black Friday, creators receive giant spreadsheets of hundreds of thousands of items that will be on sale that influencers are encouraged to promote — it only makes sense that two people with a similar niche would feature the same products

That Amazon unboxing influencers are generic is not a surprise. (Although it is perhaps surprising that “person who orders tons of Amazon products and films them being unboxed” is a career now...) These influencers know they are making advertising content not art. But what does it mean that even bestselling novels are written by the logic of algorithms and rules of trending hashtags? This is HumanGPT literature. It is literary slop.

Slop has become the term for the GenAI “content” that is increasingly mucking up the internet. There are artistic and creative uses for AI—you don’t need to jump in the comments to tell me that—but “slop” refers to the generic gunk forced on us by tech platforms and pumped out by spammers, grifters, and bots. You can’t use Google image search or log into Facebook these days without seeing endless slop.

The above AI grannies are actually the more interesting AI slop, since they slip into quasi-Surrealism. Though even that gets old after a couple pics. AI slop is mostly bland regurgitations of human work, such as Google search’s dull (and frequently incorrect) AI Overviews or Meta’s AI users that were so useless they deleted them in embarrassment.

One of Meta’s AI users on Instagram.

There has always been generic art. Always been formulaic TV shows, focus-grouped movies, and unoriginal novels. But we’ve entered a new era of blandness. An age defined by the algorithms of big tech platforms that dominate most of the distribution channels for art and media (and who keep almost all of the profits). An era of data harvesting to tailor everything to the safest and most generic. A time of inattention, where we watch movies while scrolling social media and read books in short bursts between phone notifications. The age of slop.

In the slop age, old dichotomies like “art vs. entertainment” feel outdated. For one thing, slop isn’t necessarily trying to be entertaining. I’m not just talking about beige unboxing influencers and dull AI Instagram accounts. Will Tavlin recently revealed in N+1 that Netflix wants to create shows and films that you don’t need to watch: Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.”

Slop is the natural outgrowth of art as “content.” Work whose primary purpose is to fill a bottomless container. Netflix needs tons of shows. Spotify needs tons of songs. The Kindle store needs tons of books. It doesn’t matter too much what they are. Slop is the next evolution. Slop doesn’t need to be good, amusing, entertaining, or really even anything at all. Slop just needs to exist and be pumped out, endlessly.

I realize it is harsh to call a book “slop,” but what else can one call novels collaboratively “speed written” and quite possibly plagiarized? But again, this is a trend in every artistic field. There are slop songs on Spotify, slop videos on YouTube, and slop seeping through every social media site.

And looming over all of this is GenAI, the ultimate slop machine. Programs that can produce recycled content in near-infinite amounts continuously.

We all helped create this environment. Certainly, it is no one’s fault but my own that I let my cell phone distract me all day. Still, I think the specific way social media and the internet has been shaped by the large tech companies led us to this even before the introduction of GenAI. Algorithms reward imitation. You get likes and shares for talking about what everyone else is talking about. You go viral on TikTok by imitating trending dances. You go viral on Twitter by copying the same memes and dunking on the same takes. Imitation and regurgitation is the path to success.

I fear it has warped our brains in ways we still haven’t fully grasped. I’ve wasted quite a lot of my life on social media and can daily feel the algorithms pushing me to slop. Toward dunking on the same takes everyone else is dunking on. To recycling the same memes everyone else is recycling. To thinking not in terms of creativity, difference, and novelty but in copying, mimicry, and trends.

This is getting depressing, so let me pivot. First, I should say that I don’t begrudge Wolff or anyone writing to the market. Bills have to be paid. Many writers of work I find interesting and unique have paid their bills through ghostwriting slop—celebrity memoirs, IP tie-ins, book packager gigs, “James Patterson” thrillers, etc.—and the only real difference is they don’t put their names on it. (I’ve also done this to pay bills, and in less enjoyable ways than James Patterson thrillers.) I can respect earning a living without respecting the output.

The question the age of slop prompts is whether there is any point in trying to create original work with care, attention, and intention? If we want to be writers, is the only option to jump on trends and gear our work toward hashtags while hoping that we can hide a bit of art in the muck? I do believe creativity still matters. That art matters. I probably need to believe that psychologically. But let me try to make the case.

First, a practical argument: writing a formulaic book may be easy but making money off it is hard. Slop is still a numbers game. There are countless writers trying to hop on the latest trend, whatever it is. Editors I know tell me their inboxes are flooded with Romantasy pitches from authors who have never written in the genre before. This is true in every commercially successful trend, fiction and non-fiction. Remember when bookstores were overflowing with adult coloring books, Tumbler-to-book deals, and “fratire” bro books? The vast, vast majority of authors chasing trends will fail. Their books won’t be published or if published they won’t sell. Succeeding in the slop game is a matter of luck and timing, impossible for an author to control. Because it is a numbers game, often one needs to pump out as much content as possible and as quickly as possible to increase your odds.

Between 2007 and 2018, [the author of Crave] published more than sixty romance, urban-fantasy, and young-adult novels, but it was not until she wrote a vampire-gargoyle love story that she shot to the top of the New York Times best-seller list.

More than sixty books in eleven years. You have to admire the hustle, sincerely. That is quite a lot of output, though not uncommon among commercial-oriented writers. It’s conventional wisdom in the self-publishing world that you need to publish many books a year to work the algorithms and grow a readership. Writing a generic book may be easy, but building a career doing so takes a lot of work and/or luck.

Obviously, most writers fail in any literary style, genre, or form. The majority of good novels fail as frequently or more frequently than bad ones. Interesting work is lost in the black holes of submission queues every day. We all know this. Yet if your odds of failure are high no matter what, wouldn’t you rather make something that you are proud of? Something unique or at least unique to you? Something you wrote following your own interests and by your own hand that no one else could have produced?

And do you want to write something with time, attention, and care? Or do you want to write a half-dozen books a year as quickly as you can?

Every author I know suffers from imposter’s syndrome and anxiety. I’m currently filled with anxiety about the release of my next novel, Metallic Realms. (Obligatory pre-order link.) I have no clue if people will think the book is good or whether it will be a hit or a flop. But I do know that is a novel only I would have written, for better or worse. It is made of my tastes, memories, quirks, and obsessions. It is something I added to the world that would not have been added otherwise.

Another reason to steer away from HumanGPT lit: ChatGPT. GenAI programs like ChatGPT are still a long ways from replacing humans in creating interesting, original art. But AI is good at regurgitation and imitation. With a little bit of human oversight, GenAI can perhaps already produce a decent slop novel at an even quicker pace than collaborative speed writing. Some writers are already using AI in this way, in fact. Hell, AI slop novels are already such a problem in the self-published space that Amazon is changing rules to try and stop the slop flood.

How long will it be until a publisher like Entangled stops thinking “I need to pay a writer to quickly write a book capitalizing on hashtag trends” and starts thinking “I’ll get ChatGPT to vomit out a novel capitalizing on hashtag trends for free”?

If you don’t write to the market trends, you may fail. But you won’t be in competition with the slop, AI or otherwise. There’s this silly idea that “books” are all competing for the same eyeballs, but that was never true. The readers who are happy reading “trope bingo books”—as a smart editor I know referred to them—are not the readers who were going to buy more interesting or challenging works. They are not in the bookstore doing a coin flip between Crave and Middlemarch (or whatever book you love) any more than your diehard MCU stan is a coin flip away from going to see a four-hour Eastern European art film instead of the fifteenth Spider-Man reboot. People have different tastes. That’s all fine and good.

My point is just that the readers of the kind of work I find interesting—and the kind of work you find interesting, whatever that might be—are out there. Readers who value something unique, different, challenging, or surprising. Readers who are looking for the kind of work only you can write. They may be dwindling in number, yes, but they still exist. Don’t you want to write something for them to read before they disappear?

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If you enjoy this newsletter, consider subscribing or checking out my recent science fiction novel The Body Scout—which The New York Times called “Timeless and original…a wild ride, sad and funny, surreal and intelligent”—or preorder my forthcoming weird-satirical-science-autofiction novel Metallic Realms.