“Write Badly, It’s Beautiful” Is Cute Until You Have a Job
Posts like “I’d rather read a million words of the worst, most OOC, badly spelled Mary Sue fanfic written by a human than a single sentence of AI slop” are honestly adorable in their naivety. That’s the kind of thing you say when you still live in a world where time is infinite and homework is the only thing on your calendar.
In adult life, attention is the rarest resource in the room. I’m a designer; the numbers have been getting worse for years. There was a time when you could assume a user would give a page maybe 12 seconds before bouncing. Then it was closer to 8. Whatever the exact current figure is, the curve is going in one direction: down. You fight for seconds, not for “a million words of charmingly bad human sincerity”.
So maybe somebody should tell Tumblr’s tiny martyrs of literature that once you add work, obligations, schedules, health, sleep, a life — your free time collapses into a very small pile of hours. And in that context, “write badly, it’s necessary” stops being wholesome and starts sounding like:
please donate your limited attention to my unedited draft because I typed it with my raw, suffering fingers.
“Slop” can be human. That’s the part they never want to say out loud. The internet has been drowning in it for years, long before AI: fanfic that goes nowhere, essays that say nothing, sketches that should’ve stayed in the notebook. At some point people quietly stopped doing basic quality control on themselves and started dumping absolutely everything into public space. First it was “work in progress”, then “doodles”, then literal ballpoint scribbles on graph paper that hurt to look at. All of it wrapped in the same old story: I suffered, therefore it’s valid.
But here’s the boring, adult truth: I do not care how much you suffered over a dish if it looks awful and tastes worse. No restaurant gets away with serving garbage because “the chef cried into the sauce for four hours”. My taste buds do not owe him respect. Why should reading or looking be any different?
If you put a product into a public feed and ask for my time, then yes, I expect you to:
respect my limited attention;
run at least minimal quality control on what you’re posting;
use whatever tools you have — including AI — to make it less of a waste.
The romantic stance “never use AI, write badly, it’s beautiful because it’s human” is only sustainable if you believe other people’s hours are cheap. They’re not. For a lot of us, the real violence is not “evil models trained on Our Sacred Content”. It’s realizing you just burned your one free evening on yet another shapeless, unedited, aggressively mediocre human content — and being told you’re supposed to clap because someone’s wrists hurt while they were doing it.