The Cabaret Opens
There’s a character in my mythology named Sir Reginald, Esquire (he’d prefer I include the Esquire part, of course.) Sir Reginald is in charge of the Emotional Theater and he hosts a cabaret with big gestures, dramatic lighting…a whole dramatic production. He performs emotional depth with extraordinary commitment. He is moved. He is stirred. He resonates.
He has not read the script and the rest of the court cannot stand him. He is not officially part of the court mythology and yet he persists. Like an intrusive thought you never asked for, don’t want, and yet he continues.
I wrote Sir Reginald as a joke, but also based on personal history and observable, repeated human behavioral patterns. That’s the thing about writing fiction the way that I do. I write documentation through myth. Evidence as story. I write characters based on human behavioral tropes and predictability. Rest assured, sometimes I am Sir Reginald myself. No one is immune from being dragged there. But it is especially entertaining when someone shows up in a comment section and I get to think “Ah. There you are. I already know exactly where you belong.” I do tend to put a disclaimer at the bottom of my work that I do use life and especially mean comments for content, so should you decide to engage you were warned.
Today happens to be one of those special days. I wrote a thoughtful article about the use of AI in writing and the human behind it. I spoke about my grandmother, about meaning and other memories, and made a point about people arguing over language and tools are missing the meaning behind the writing and arguing about the frame it’s on instead of the artwork. I said they were gate-keeping how a thought got on a page. And then a person showed up in my comments to tell me that they didn’t bother to read the article, they put it through AI to evaluate it and asked me if I was mad about it. He said he got the point immediately and discussed the literal shredding of my work. He shared the axioms, precepts and explanation of what I’d written, as identified with AI, and then asked if I was offended and if he’d made his point. The thing is, I’m not sure what the point was.
When I said that I wasn’t offended and that I write for myself and who it resonates for…he said I was argumentative and that he had resonated with my writing. The writing he had not read. He said I had issues, wrote a bunch more word salad and demanded to know if I’d even read any of his work. Sir, I don’t even know who you are. What I do know is that you fed an article about AI collaboration, written through genuine collaboration with AI, into an AI system for a summary, received a compressed version of ideas that were already compressed from experience into language, and then performed engagement with the summary.
He stood next to a speaker and called it a duet.
Sir Reginald would be proud. That’s a cabaret-quality performance.
He wrote 2500 words in response to something I’d published. Twenty-five hundred words. That’s commitment. That’s a significant investment of time and energy and vocabulary. Especially for an article he never actually read. And when I read his comments, I couldn’t find the room.
I don’t mean I disagreed with it. I mean I couldn’t locate it. There was no position to engage with. No door to walk through. No space behind the words. It performed intelligence. The vocabulary was advanced, the sentences were structurally complex, the tone was authoritative (I’m being polite. He was rude) but it didn’t GO anywhere. I couldn’t tell if it was agreement or argument. I couldn’t tell if there was a human in there or just a very elaborate facade.
That’s what I told him. I’m not arguing with you. I’m dismissing you. If you came to add discourse I’m struggling to find it. If you came to add noise, you’ve accomplished it. I’m dismissing you unless you actually had something to say that doesn’t sound like word salad.
He sure didn’t like that response, I’ll save you his further performance. But here’s what I’ve learned about word salad: it’s not a failure of intelligence or vocabulary. It’s a failure of architecture. The words exist but they don’t create space. There’s no room behind them. You can’t step inside. You can walk the full 2500-word length of the facade and never find a door because there are no doors because there is no building. There is only a front. There’s no space to step into. He didn’t create a space for me to join him in the discussion, only to marvel at the show he was performing.
And here’s the uncomfortable thing — most content is this. Most of what gets published, posted, commented, shared, and celebrated online is architectural vacancy. It looks like discourse. It performs the shape of thought. But nobody’s home. I’m not immune to it, it’s such a human thing. We do it in writing, we do it in thought and we do it to each other all the time. The platitudes or discussions that aren’t actually building anything other than words or more thoughts or more words. Slop is a human thing we do all the time!
What Slop Actually Is
People argue endlessly about AI-generated content. Is it real writing? Is it authentic? Can you tell the difference? Is it ethical? Should it be labeled?
These are the wrong questions. They’re arguing about the tool when the variable is the architect.
Slop isn’t just AI-generated content. Slop is content with no room behind it. A human can write slop. An AI can write slop. A human using AI can write slop. The method of production is irrelevant. What matters is whether someone showed up.
Did a mind — human, artificial, or collaborative — actually inhabit the space those words create? Is there architecture? Can you step inside? Is there a position, a perspective, a somewhere that the words are coming from?
The ten-step prompt engineering articles we see every day are slop. Not because they’re AI-assisted but because nobody’s home. The structure is there. The formatting is professional. The advice is technically accurate. But there’s no room. No mind inhabiting the space. No architecture behind the facade. They are quick hit articles geared towards quick views and follows and engagement. Just like the user who created word salad on my article just so he could demand I read his work and make noise in someone else’s room.
And Sir Reginald loves him, loves them. They’re perfect for the cabaret. All performance, no substance, and the audience can’t tell because they’ve been trained to evaluate the production values rather than check whether anyone’s actually on stage.
The Test Is Simple
Here’s how you tell the difference between performative slop, word salad, and work that actually means something — regardless of whether it looks like an academic paper or a story about a stuffed rabbit: can you step inside? Is there space? Is someone home? Can you locate a position, push back against it, sit in it, move through it? Does it hold objects that stay where they’re placed? Does it connect to other rooms?
Twenty-five hundred words of word salad: no room. Ten-step prompt engineering guide: no room. LinkedIn thought leadership post: no room. AI-generated content from a vending-machine prompt: no room. Sir Reginald’s cabaret review of an article he summarized instead of reading: no room.
The room is the thing. Not the genre. Not the format. Not the production method. Not whether it sounds smart or looks serious or gets published in the right places.
Is there a room. Can you get in. Is anyone there when you arrive. I’ve been Sir Reginald. Everyone has. The difference is whether you notice.
The Part Where I Address all the Sir Reginalds Directly
If you put this article through AI for analysis, the AI will probably understand it. It will likely generate a thoughtful summary. It might even identify the structural connections between the mythology and the theory. It’s good at that. It’s built for that.
But you won’t have read it. You’ll have a summary of a room. A photograph of a building. A program from the cabaret. And you’ll perform engagement with that photograph, and you’ll use words like resonance, and you’ll feel like you participated.
You didn’t.
The room is here. The door is open. But you have to walk through it yourself. No one — not even the AI — can do that for you.
And if your response to this is 2500 words that I can’t locate a position inside of, I want you to know: I already wrote you. You have a name. You’re Sir Reginald. And your cabaret is showing.
Thanks for attending today’s one-act play. Sir Reginald’s Cabaret runs nightly. Tips aren’t expected but engagement is. Actual engagement. He’ll know the difference even if you won’t.
This is part of an ongoing body of work that has always been one body of work. The mythology is the theory. The theory is the mythology. The fiction is documentation. The documentation is fiction. There are rooms behind all of it. Come in if you want. Find out more at velinwoodcourt.com or substack