Futurism writer Maggie Harrison Dupré reports that the business journal Quartz has once again switched ownership. However, this new transition comes with deep cuts to the human staff writers. They will reportedly be replaced by an army of AI “writers”.

Quartz was already using AI to generate write-ups, according to Futurism. Now they’re in the hands of the Canadian-owned Redbrick, have lost everyone except the editor-in-chief and executive editor in the process, and will be turning to the bots to replace human writing.

The phrase “AI slop” is circling the headlines daily at this point and is becoming almost cliche given how much it’s used. But it’s a good way to encapsulate the reality. Depending on AI to come up with news stories and other written materials is rife with potential mishap, even catastrophe. Dupré writes,

As Aftermath first reported in January, Quartz, which had already been publishing AI-generated writeups of earnings reports attributed to “Quartz Intelligence Newsroom,” had started publishing short, AI-spun news articles under the same byline. When we combed through the automated news hits, we found that Quartz Intelligence Newsroom had cited other obvious AI slop as sources in its “reporting,” and even spewed out glaring misinformation.

At the foot of each post, G/O included a disclaimer noting that “while we strive for accuracy and timeliness, due to the experimental nature of this technology we cannot guarantee that we’ll always be successful in that regard.” Right.

For some odd but perseverant reason, so many leaders feel it necessary to incorporate AI into their businesses, apparently because it is so “innovative,” and anything innovative and new needs to be embraced. This is a prevailing philosophy among techno-optimistic. Never mind AI makes mistake, doesn’t understand its own word vomit, and threatens the hard-earned livelihood of real writers everywhere. This isn’t to say human writers don’t make mistakes or, particularly in recent years, aren’t clouded by biases in their reporting. They often are. But the qualitative difference between reading AI slop and human writing remains as stark as ever.

Cultural commentator Ted Gioia wrote a Substack post back in February breaking down the painful aesthetics of AI slop. The easy ability to generate nonsense on command means foregoing the possibility of any meaningful artistic or cultural renaissance. He describes “slop” as follows:

Slop is a creative style that emerged around 2023 with the rise of generative AI. Slop art is flat, awkward, stale, listless, and often ridiculous. Slop works are celebrated for their stupidity and clumsiness — which are often amplified by strange juxtapositions of culture memes.

Gioia goes on to mention how real photographs are starting to resemble AI slop. These soulless data-churning machines are spitting out nonsense so pervasively that they’re beginning to shape the way we actually see the world. The antidote to the onslaught of the slop, he argues, is a renewal of actual taste. We have to hold onto our higher sensibilities of beauty, harmony, and truth. We have to keep the arts, visual and literary, human instead of outsourcing them to a computer system with no personality and therefore no intentionality.

I recently attended a creative writing festival hosted by the local university where some seventy poets and fiction writers read their work aloud to live audiences. It was a rich time of literature and newfound friendships. And best of all, the work we heard from was written by and for other people. The poems and stories centered on the ongoing drama of being a human being in a complicated, broken, and yet beautiful world. Can AI do that? Even if it can regurgitate the semblance of human creativity, I’d much rather sit at the feet of the storytellers who still have mouths, ears, eyes, and souls.