I thought I’d start documenting the many, many instances of AI slop making human artists’ lives difficult, if not altogether impossible. This is the first of many entries.

Back in March 2026, “Myths & Legends,” an imprint of Hearth Stories, announced their new anthology, “The Gren-Wode: Tales From Sherwood Forest.” The anthology would contain stories and poems based in the world of Robin Hood, and it would pay anywhere from $5 to $50 for poems and short stories, accepting reprints as well as the originals. You can find the original call for submissions over here. Note how it was supposed to last through the end of September…

Fast-forward to a week ago, the end of July. The editor sent out a truly tragic email: there were so many blatantly AI stories and so many stories that may or may not have been AI slop, that they chose to cancel the entire anthology rather than risk publishing slop. The full text of the email is below:

Thank you for your submission to “The Gren-Wode: Tales From Sherwood Forest”. It is with sadness that I am writing to you to let you know that we will not be moving forward with the anthology (or with the “Myths & Legends” imprint in general).

The landscape of open submissions for fiction and poetry has shifted over the past few years. No more so, in our experience, than with this anthology. We have been flooded with a large volume of clear AI/LLM submissions. We have also received a lot of submissions that feel like they are in a gray area where they are likely AI/LLM created or assisted. The increased volume may be timing and the state of submissions in the fiction world right now, or it may be due in part to the fact that we were focusing on characters and stories that are already in the public domain and have a large volume of material already scraped into generative tooling. It is a simple thing to spit out variations, and it seems that many people out there have realized this.

It is a core part of our mission to support human expression and connection; not commerce, not clever machine rearrangement, etc. As a result, we have come to the difficult decision to cancel this and future publications from this imprint. We appreciate your time, your interest, your support, and are very sorry that things have gone this way.

Best wishes,
Sloum

The message isn’t posted on their site, it exists only as an email. To corroborate it, here is a tearful video from a fellow author who was just as heartbroken by that news. Unfortunately, her appeals to the lazy AI sloppers (but I’m being redundant) almost certainly won’t affect them.

I’m a fairly new author, as such things go. I started actively submitting my stories just over two years ago, and my very first published story came out in August 2024. Since then, I’ve been published in quite a few anthologies, with quite a few more in development (which takes a while). Some of them had delays and production issues, but none, absolutely none of them experienced something as horrific as this.

Part of the problem in this particular case was that all the Robin Hood stories are in public domain. All of them were used to train slop engines (they are not, and never have been, “artificial intelligence”) and thus the scammers who flooded the gates merely had to press a button to generate endless stories and poems related to Robin Hood’s world.

There is a war being waged, a war between sloppers and human writers. And we humans are on the losing side right now. Many of these defeats are known only within the writing community, and even then — like in this case — they very nearly fade away. I aim to change that. I want to shine a spotlight on this invisible war. I want more people to know what exactly they support when they support slop, how exactly they contribute to the collapse of the arts. I want them to have no good excuse to avert their eyes, for they deserve to see the outcome of their decisions. (And everyone who deliberately engages with slop engines is responsible, even a little.)

I am an anti-gen-AI absolutist. The non-generative AI, the analytical type that helps detect cancer? That may stay. But the slop machines trained on the stolen work of artists like myself… They have no place in this world.

In conclusion, generative AI must die.