AI is fun!

I love it.
“AI slop” is a popular expression today, despite the fact that there is really no such thing. It’s a hallucination. The slop is human.
I know something about slop. During harder periods of my life, it was my bread.
Long ago, everything aspiring authors sent to a publishing house had to be reviewed. If the manuscript was rejected, it was returned to the sender with the review attached. The publishing house I worked with had a cabinet full of manuscripts waiting to be read. Hungry reviewers, myself included, would come in, pick up a book or two, take them home, read them, and write reviews.
A review paid 100 rubles. The average monthly salary of an engineer was about 120 rubles.
The country was the Soviet Union, and slop was profitable.
The arrival of AI hasn’t changed anything fundamental. The slop is still human. Garbage in, garbage out.
A writer, whether she uses AI or not, still has to have some idea of what she wants to write. She has to turn that idea into something and then, using her best judgment, edit it until it matches her own expectations—or those of some imaginary reader, if she happens to care about one.
With AI, you can say, “Write me a crime story,” and AI will come up with a crime story. It will probably be slop. Very much so.
But if you have a clear idea; if you explain it to AI in detail; if you discuss possible turns of the plot; if you feed it your own thoughts, observations, memories, and perceptions; and if you proceed slowly, scene by scene, the result can be much more satisfactory. It may even become worth reviewing and editing: cutting trivialities, tightening passages, shaping the style, changing the rhythm. Pretty much what you would be doing if you were handwriting the story in a notebook.
The so-called AI slop is the product of sloppy writers. Sloppy writers produce slop regardless of what tools they use.
Another popular argument is that if you use AI to create something, the result is somehow not original, not unique, perhaps not even copyrightable.
I don’t care.
Not as an author, and not as a consumer.
I’m going to enjoy a good story or a good film regardless of how it was created. As an author, I’m going to enjoy creating a story that satisfies me. I’ve never cared much about the reader or what he might think. The story has to satisfy me.
They never do, but I keep trying.
Creators have always used outside help, and historically we haven’t thought this particularly scandalous. Rembrandt ran something close to a painting factory. He conceived and supervised paintings while pupils and assistants participated in their execution, and works from his workshop could emerge under his name. James A. Michener, a famously prolific author, also relied heavily on researchers and editorial assistance in producing his enormous books.
We still call them Rembrandts and Michener novels.
If you were going to ask whether I use AI to help me write: of course I do.
First, it’s becoming almost unavoidable. AI is now built into word processors and other tools we use every day.
Second, English isn’t my native language. I’ve spent many years living in different countries, away from Lithuania, speaking and writing in different languages. Over that time—close to half a century—Lithuanian stopped being my primary language, the one I automatically think, speak, and read in. It became one language among several. These days I use it mostly to talk to my dogs and, occasionally, to my grandchildren.
I use English most of the time, but English doesn’t give me quite the freedom of expression that a native language should. So when I begin turning an idea into prose, the process can be slightly painful. I’m never entirely confident about phrasing, grammar, rhythm, or whether something that sounds perfectly natural inside my head sounds equally natural to somebody else.
In short, an editor would be useful.
I don’t have one.
So—AI.
While working on a story, I may run passages through ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, and Perplexity and cherry-pick whatever helps. Sometimes that means streamlining a paragraph, cutting something when I get too wordy, or fixing grammar and punctuation. Sometimes a suggestion leads somewhere unexpected. Sometimes everything suggested is useless and I throw it away.
I don’t care what percentage of the resulting text could theoretically be attributed to AI. The original idea is mine, and so is the backbone of the story. But even those things—the idea and the backbone—aren’t sacred to me. If changing them makes the story better, I’ll change them.
What matters is the finished result.
I want the story to be to my liking. That is really the only point I want to make clear.
As a kid, I read constantly. I paid attention to authors’ names mostly because knowing the name made it easier to find another book I might enjoy. I was never particularly curious about the people behind the books, and I’m not now. I just don’t care. In the same way, I don’t care who directed a movie I like or which actors appeared in it, and I make no effort to memorize their names.
I care about the thing itself.
And I don’t write for the reader, either. I never have—not even long before AI, when stories had to be constructed laboriously with a pen on paper.
For me, the reward has always been the process rather than what might come afterward: recognition, royalties, reviews, or anything else.
Earlier in my life, I was involved in sports and spent an enormous amount of time swimming, running, jumping, and rowing. Then sports became boring, and I became interested in painting. For several years I enjoyed training my eye to notice the smallest shifts in light and color, and I painted gouache still lifes.
Then I got bored again.
I dropped painting and picked up writing.
I’m completely egoistic about it. My only real motive is to entertain myself. If other people enjoy the results, fine. I don’t mind. I might even encourage them. But I would never let their opinions spoil my fun.

Names

I had known nothing about him, never heard that name, but when I saw him for the very first time, he reminded me of a rat. So I started calling him Rat. After a while, though, his posture, his body language, closely matched that of Dostoyevsky’s character called Smerdiakoff. Since then, I’ve been calling him both, intermittently, Rat and Smerdiakoff. Stinky rat V. Putin.

The Perception of Time

I had thought when the time comes, when I grow old, retire, there will plenty of time. Lots of it. Oceans. I will be able to swim in it. The days will be endless and minutes and seconds will flow slowly like syrup out of a bottle. How wrong I was! Turns out, with age, time vanishes altogether. Back then (Last year? Yesterday?), if a business was closed and I had to wait for an hour, I would be mad and just leave. In the worst case, if it was absolutely necessary, I would sit there counting every second. Now, it’s a “Ha, fine.” It feels like five minutes or less.

Lack of Diversity in the Movie Industry

For years now, during Oscars and elsewhere, the progressive critics have been complaining about missing diversity in the industry ranks. Lack of women. Supposedly, some roles don’t require male actors and could be easily adapted for females. Lack of different races, or skin shade variety, to avoid sounding racist. Supposedly, certain characters are color ambiguous and can be played by virtually anyone. Then all the familiar LGBT related appeals that I am somewhat lazy to get into details here. Probably it’s all correct. However, over the years, as those remedies are being implemented (with variable success), the lament doesn’t get any quieter. The problem is still here. It doesn’t go away. Well I have a simple solution that would make the problem vanish. Merge mainstream with porn. Fuse AMPAS with AFAA. The latter is packed with everything that critics cry missing in the first. Multitudes of women, all divisions and all gradations of LGBT, the whole gamut of colors, everyone and everything, you name it. See, the lack of diversity issue is totally artificial and based on hypocritical division. Remove the barrier of bigotry and stop crying.