# When Slop Becomes Sustenance

> Hand crafted without any AI assistance excepting of course the ways in which large language models subtly pervade the zeitgeist everywhere and anywhere these days 

**Published by:** [Pioneering Spirit](https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/)
**Published on:** 2025-08-17
**Categories:** ai, writing
**URL:** https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/when-slop-becomes-sustenance

## Content

Dear readers, You may have noticed that this year my posts shifted from hand penned artisanal crafted posts to a curated bit of what increasingly is called slop.* I say may because I really have no idea how many actual flesh and blood people really read this silly little web like log of various ideas and missives from the frontiers I spend time intellectually exploring. And no I make no apologies for said slop. I have a lot of ideas and AI offers a nice way for a busy dad with lots of actual #dayJob commitments so having a machine take a seed of an idea and water it into a kronenberg-esque slice of slop is nothing short of beautiful. No longer the AOL enabled idyllic Wild West of the 90s nor the tranquil walled garden where people actually talked with real friends (tm) on tools like facebook in the early aughts, today’s internet is a Mad Max esque post apocalyptic wasteland. So a bit of actually nutritious slop crafted from the dull but important work of fixing potholes, piping public data properly and generally doing the “eat your broccoli” work of sharing out ideas is worth I exaggerate only slightly. But I have noticed that some of my readers who like to skim didn’t really realize that I was writing with AI or were a bit confused. Caring deeply for the integrity of the writing process and the art of passion projects, I thought I’d offer an explanation as an opportunity to clarify my thoughts on the subject. Some people bristle at the use of AI in writing. The slurs write themselves. It’s not authentic. It’s cheating. Or worse. Ironically, many who say this stuff don't bother to write themselves but still have Opinions™ about the creative process. But then again, plenty of people also have opinions about how others should parent, exercise, or eat. Here’s a simple truth: I’m not paid to do this. I write these posts because I enjoy them. I could cook every night, but mostly I don’t. I could hand-stitch all my clothes, but I don’t. Technology mediates almost every part of modern life, including creativity. Why single out AI as the impure intrusion? The real question isn’t whether a text is “authentic,” but whether it moves you. Whether it makes you think or laugh or groan. If a post sparked something in your mind, do you care if the sentence was assembled by my keystroke, or by a model I prodded and then edited down to shape? I got in a holy war debate with an old friend on this subject over gchat, one of those early aught communication platforms that I love. The argument wasn’t fun though did crystalize a couple of concepts for me as well as feel oddly apropos to argue on the internet about well the augmented information retrievel of the memory of the entire uh internet. (Aka another way of describing AI.) To offer an argument by analogy, AI is a bit like the calculator. You can do the math longhand if you want, but the calculator offers a means to save time if you like, with of course tradeoffs in terms of the joy and learning that comes from doing things manually. Of course, calculators don’t make you a mathematician. Garbage in, garbage out remains the rule for both calculation and LLM prompting. And there is a a lot of value in practicing math regardless.** But maybe calculator is too sterile an analogy for the Creative Spirit (tm). Let me offer another: AI is like photography compared to painting. Painters interpret the world stroke by stroke, while photographers point, frame, and shoot. Yet AI complicates the metaphor, because unlike a photograph it does not bind itself to the signified reality. Its relation to the world is more impressionistic, even more so than painting. It produces a fuzzy JPEG of the collective internet, a shimmering refraction of bias and beauty alike. I have increasingly liked the direction of the Summer of Protocols crowd talking about AI as a memory tool, a means of superhistory rather than superintelligence. That seems apropos and also puts the various progress points regarding various Math Olympiad and professional tests in perspective. (Memory is after all key for test taking.) But I digress. Ultimately I’m just a dad and a dude who has a lot of ideas. I like to share them. Some people enjoy them. If you don’t really like any AI enabled slop spilling out of my brimming mind-bucket of ideas, you are free to unsubscribe. (I can’t figure out a fancy way of bifurcating hand penned posts from AI slop stuff in this artisanal early web3 blogo-email platform I’m using.) Ultimately this web like log, or blog to use the now common portmanteau, offers a way to share out ideas more like first draft open source memos that lead to serendipitous interactions, some professionally beneficial, some just fun. That type of small-b blogging, as Tom Critchlow frames it, is about lowering the stakes so that publishing becomes an act of thinking-out-loud rather than a polished performance. It is not about building an audience or cultivating a brand but about keeping a living trail of ideas, half-formed and provisional, so they can bump into each other later and spark something new. In the context of writing with AI, this spirit feels even more urgent: the tool lowers friction, letting me get words on the page quickly, and what matters is not whether every line is perfect but that it exists at all, that the thought is marked and carried forward. AI helps me do that. It helps me keep this log lumbering along, keep ideas flowing, letting little sparks fly off into the ether instead of leaving them to be forgotten in some dusty recess. So yes, my posts these days may be less “artisan,” less “authentic” in the narrow sense of every word being hammered from my solitary brain. But they are, I hope, more alive—because they exist at all. And yes that’s an em dash for those Very Online folks who notice such things and what that ostensibly signifies about authorship😛 Kind regards, PAtwater*By which I of course mean in an overly ponderously way that I once actually banged my fingers together onto a keyboard rather than dictating a few spare thoughts into my tricorder like glass brick that is so much more than a phone these days that then went into a magical text box that spits out readable digests that seem to do a good enough job of conveying the gist of an idea to folks with vastly different life experiences all over the world. Yes the latter is pretty magical, particularly since I can do it while hanging with my daughter at the park or over a workout by where the homebrew computer club was started. But again I digress. Btw... Who wrote this post? Surely you’ve noticed the tone is different? Do you care? ** I still work on sharpening my estimating abilities and am currently poking around Street-Fighting Mathematics. Header image context: exactly like Socrates and every blogger everywhere, I am heroically defending eternal principles by sharing ideas widely on the internet, and no slander of AI co-authorship shall deter me from the truth, hemlock be damned. If you made it this far… perhaps you’d like to take a two question survey?

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