My guilty pleasure is watching long videos about book gossip and deep dives but mostly book gossip. My partner jokes that I always have chisme playing in my ears during the day, and it’s unfortunately true because there is something about low stakes book world mess that just soothes my brain. I don’t listen to most true crime because of the ethical issues surrounding it, but book gossip and six hour long breakdowns for terrible books do it for me. After listening to a ten hour video breaking down Age of Scorpius by Milo Winter, a six plus hour breakdown of Empress Theresa by Norman Boutin, and a two and a half hour breakdown of Shy Girl by Mia Ballard all in the same week, I have one thing to say.
I would rather read a thousand terrible, ridiculous books written by passionate humans than even one AI-assisted or written book.
I could spend hours talking about the Age of Scorpius mess. I am aware that it has become my Roman Empire as a queer, autistic indie author, especially one who teaches creative writing students around Milo’s age, because I could have been Milo as a young person, but he’s also a special brand of tool that will probably never be duplicated. The whole situation fascinates me because it’s a tale of hubris where the author couldn’t do more to get a sympathetic audience to find him insufferable if he tried. I have watched more videos about it than I would care to admit, and this past weekend, I listened to an almost ten hour video that broke down everything that was wrong with Age of Scorpius structurally. Did I need to watch this? No, I don’t particularly care about the book itself, but it home for me how much I appreciate a novice writer’s passion, even when it doesn’t produce fantastic work.
I teach creative writing to college students, so I see a lot of my students in Milo Winter. They’re the same age and occasionally the same level of delulu in regards to their skills. Now, I will say that I have never read a work in my classes that was so terrible that it couldn’t be fixed, and I will 100% stand behind it. The problem is when the student won’t get out of their own way to improve their skills. That’s the most frustrating bit when giving editorial feedback to any writer, not the bad writing itself. Over the years, I’ve had more than one person ask me how I can read works from newbie writers and give feedback when I’m a writer myself and know its “bad.”
Here’s the thing, works by newbie writers who love to write or are discovering their love of writing are the absolutely best to read. They might be rough, but the passion behind them are so obvious that any bits of “bad” writing are opportunities for improvement, not devastating flaws. When students are in my class, they are there because they want to be better writers. They are spending their time and money to improve their skills, and writing “badly” is the first step to “good” writing.
Writing takes years of sustained effort, not the 10,000 hours Milo mentions in his videos, but years of reading or watching other media, writing your own stuff, getting feedback and using that feedback, working on your craft, dissecting other works to see how they do things that work well or appeal to you. The vast majority of writing as a craft isn’t necessarily writing. A lot of it is thinking, parsing out ideas, figuring out how to best structure things, or as I tell my students, squinting at your computer or staring at a blank piece of paper. Writing has never been and never will be exclusively adding words to a document. Getting better at writing isn’t about productive output either. In order to write well or write at all, one needs time to decompress, think, and learn.
All of the arts are connected. Hell, everything is connected. In order to write an entertaining book, you need to explore the world (whether that’s physically or through other books or videos is up to you). In a more metaphorical sense of A Room of One’s Own, you need space to do and think in order to be a good writer. Ass in chair is important, and it’s a step I struggle with, but giving yourself quiet time to think is equally important. In a world where everyone demands immediate replies with constant notifications, having quiet to think is a luxury in and of itself.
AI writing only cares about the product or the output, and that is incredibly sad in how much it misses the point of writing. I sat through a two and a half hour breakdown of Shy Girl, which appears to have been heavily AI-assisted. As someone who has read quite a few AI-assisted essays from my college freshmen, I agree with the video creator’s assessment that the book was written by AI. The premise is interesting, and I think that is something the author came up with herself. The problem is that she off-loaded the important bits (the writing and conceptualizing) to a chat bot. The prose is empty, disjointed, and shallow. Yes, I have read plenty of newbie writers’ work that had all of those things, but AI doesn’t think like a human. All of the human mess I am accustomed to as a teacher of creative writing is missing. The passion behind the mess is most obviously absent. The parts that were read aloud in the video made it clear that neither the author nor the chat bot gave a single thought to preserving through-lines in the story. Pieces of information were brought up and discarded without a single thought, never to be mentioned again. Logic didn’t exist past what the chat bot’s short memory could allow, and the writer didn’t remember the story enough to keep that logic going.
Human writers drop threads, especially newer writers, but they don’t tend to drop all of them along with any and all characterization. SavvyWritesBooks did a video on Empress Theresa, which is a book that has been infamous on the internet for over a decade because it’s premise is absurd and its author is equally ridiculous, but while Norman drops threads without a care, the overall drive of the book doesn’t falter and neither does his characterization of the main character, Theresa. He might add in some old man-isms that come out of his teenage MC’s mouth, but the story still has cohesion, even if it is absolutely wild.
The driving cohesion behind any AI work I have had the misfortune of reading has been how vapid it is. The emptiness of the pieces is obvious to anyone acquainted with human writing or beginner errors. The worst piece of writing I have ever read in my classes is far and above any AI writing simply because there is passion behind it. It’s the same with art. A drawing done by a young child with crayons is better than something that was generated out of the slop machine because the child making it had the passion to imagine something and make it.
Unskilled doesn’t necessarily mean bad. It usually just means messy. Age of Scorpius and Empress Theresa are messy as hell, but the unifying feature behind them is that both of their authors were really into the thing they were working on. That much is obvious. Shy Girl is past messy; it’s empty. There’s a void where characterization, setting, and plot should be. Cobwebs in the shape of a book are a pale imitation of the real thing, and AI slop is a poor substitute for even amateurish writing.
I would rather read a hundred books where it’s clear the author has no idea what they’re doing because at least they are doing it on their own with their brains instead of outsourcing growth and skill to something that can only regurgitate rather than create.
Kara Jorgensen 