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Superslop, and How It Will Kill Your Book Deal
2026/08/20

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What I like about this article is that it gives us an extended extract from the beginning of Winter Takes One, "an 89,000-word upmarket thriller" that was written by an AI and "led to a four-way bidding war and a $3.5 million, two-book deal." It's an example of 'superslop', AI writing that actually fools professional editors. I also agree with the conclusions, two of them: "Commercial writing, at any level of quality, might be dead. It's already nearly impossible for a writer to earn a living on the quality of text"; and "Superslop will continue to evolve. It will defeat AI autograders. It will defeat human literary agents." Photo by me.

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The Most Expensive Private School in Oklahoma: And It Has No Teachers
2026/08/20

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This article might have a good story to report - an Oklahoma school that is completely automated that costs more than any other school in the state. But it's mostly an exercise in weak AI writing - see the process here. On the surface it seems to be well written, but oh! it goes on and on and on, doesn't have any real sense of a narrative arc (much less of the inverted pyramid), and is filled with filler. I read every one of the 5104 words in what should have been, at most, a 1000 word article. So much agony! Like this: "W. Ian O'Byrne, an associate professor of literacy education at the College of Charleston who has studied digital literacy for two decades, put the pedagogical objection cleanly in The Conversation on 15 June 2026: effective learning is not always efficient." Or, "The legal position is worse than most parents will assume." Or "The second half of the question is what this does to teaching as an occupation, and here the answer has less to do with any individual school than with the signal a price sends." 

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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