I first taught composition at New Mexico St in 1992. Then there was the in-class common essay prompt everyone had to do. It had something to do with television violence. I remember this because every essay started with either “Since the dawn of time people have face the problem of tv violence” or “The dictionary defines violence as.” And the solution was always channel blockers. Why? Because this was the era of the “V-chip.” Just in case you thought that developing BS technological solutions to BS technological problems was in any way new.

At the end of the decade, while I was a post-doc at Georgia Tech, I made extra money grading HS common essays in Georgia. It was depressing reading anonymous students (some of whom were surely African-American) negotiate the prompt of “Which period of American history would you like to live in?” I am not kidding. Of course they could go with “Would you rather shop in a mall or downtown?”

That old chestnut.

Anyone who has done that kind of reading/assessing can understand what the human version of AI slop has been. One of the functions/effects of writing instruction is the production of predictable human slop. We do not need to align ourselves with this outcome and increase it, but in some ways it is unavoidable. If we are seeking specific outcomes, slop will always be generated (not only slop, but also slop). If you look at the “meets expectations” column in your rubric, that’s a human readable weight system for the generation of slop through the recursive “writing” process of revision.

To write in a predictable fashion where the outcome is well-trodden by others if not you (yet) is to develop a writing habit. And a habit is, what a habit is: the ballast that ties a dog to its vomit (Beckett’s line). Which points to Proverbs: 26 11: “As a dog returns to its vomit, so fools repeat their folly.” And then there’s Ben Franklin. You get the idea.

It is important to note, I think, that the students who wrote those essays did so under command. They did it to achieve a transactional purpose unrelated to the specific content of the text. They wrote to meet a set of standards that were imposed upon them without negotiation. Within that context, they meant what they wrote to achieve their ends. Was what they said true or factual? As you might expect from 18 year olds. There’s no motive to deceive in this context.

Usually. I remember my experience writing one of these in NJ. You were supposed to write about a meaningful experience in your life. Obviously I wrote fiction, because fuck you. It was part of the standard state HS exam. I did well enough to get a scholarship.

In part I think it is fair to say that the state, including universities, deserve nothing better from humans than slop. If slop gets you what you want from the relationship then you are nearly obligated to produce slop. As chair I write tons of slop emails where I just say what needs to be said to get the job done. Is it true? Is it just? Is it thoughtful? Who can tell? It is certainly slop because it is obligated to be slop.

Maybe I need to pause here and distinguish between slop and “sloppy.” I don’t think sloppy is an epistemological condition that can be attributed to computational media. It isn’t sloppy, regardless of our opinion of its outputs. Similarly human slop isn’t sloppy. It takes a fair amount of skill to produce functional human slop. It is instead the cybernetic demand to satisfice to the lowest common denominator in an environment where the Nash equilibrium is set to enshitify. (Enshitification being the primary mechanism for the neoliberal capitalist mining for profit margins within a platform economy.)

Writing “processes” work for the predictable composition of human text-communication-slop as generative AI reliably produce AI text-communication-slop. You have to produce human slop to get tenure. It’s vomit or perish as always: better out than in. If my compositions do not remain tied to predictability then they will have no exchange value. Again, it is not that it is all slop (your mileage may vary).

Just remember that if you are looking to exit this academic theater, you have to go through the voms.