Author: Joy Buchanan

We Overrate Books

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This is per the 2026 discussion of AI “slop” writing.

One of the things I buy at an annual local rummage sale is cheap physical media like books. This year, I picked up a book by a cartoonist who I like and respect. I thought his book would be funny and prescient from the standpoint of the publication date (1995). The book is 250 pages of mostly slop. Humans wrote lots of slop and it got printed by publishers who had a captive audience.

Why did I have such high expectations for a printed book? I think it is because, as of 2026, we are more selective about what we print. A filtering has happened. Many novels printed 100 years ago were junk.

When I think of “books” today, what it really makes me think of is “classics” or the top 0.01% of books.

So, score one point for the slopistas. Human writing was not universally smart or inspiring.

What I hate about slop is seeing it in spaces I used to trust. There was a time when I could log in to LinkedIn and see human writing from people who I had chosen to follow because I like them as people. There was a contract for my attention that is broken with slop.

I sense some push and pull in the algorithm whereby the sites might be suppressing slop, right now, relative to what I was seeing weeks ago. I went to LinkedIn on 7/17/26 to do a slop check and saw none. They might be trying to preserve the lead that James identified earlier this year: The Hot Social Network Is… LinkedIn?

Oddly, one of the worst bot-infested spaces I tread into is Facebook groups about sourdough bread making. I think the space is not important enough for Facebook to police, and the human users are not very sophisticated when it comes to tech. I logged this observation back in January.

Consider this an update to by 2023 post What We Are Learning about Paper Books

Fable on Legibility

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Claude Fable is Anthropic’s most capable publicly available “Mythos-class” model. It is optimized for long-running autonomous tasks and deep knowledge work. The roll out of this product has been dramatic. Little people like me have access to it for only two weeks, and I doubt I will be able to afford it thereafter. With my window of access, I posed it the following prompt:

“This article indicates that a much smarter model might not be possible because the universe is opaque. Since Tyler Cowen made this statement, AI has helped people make breakthroughs in math and biology. Write this again in 2026 using the latest state of technology. Is the smartest LLM today much smarter than GPT-4? And is the universe legible?” and I copied in my blog post Is the Universe Legible to Intelligence?

Fable replied in 3 pages of text which you can download as a Word doc here.

One line from Fable’s response: “Notice where the wins clustered: mathematics with checkable proofs, protein structures with experimental ground truth, contest problems with known answers. These are the maximally legible domains — places with a fixed target and a way to verify that you hit it.”

The writing is coherent and contains no obvious hallucinations. Is the answer true, and does it tell the whole truth?

Whenever you read something think about who wrote it, and keep in mind that every author/model has a bias and limitations. In my paper with Will Hickman, we found that just reminding people that a paragraph has an author (whether the author is human or AI) increased the demand for fact checking from readers. LLMs will become more persuasive and closer to (but never completely) correct. Keep reading all things with some skepticism whether they are written by scientists, politicians, or AI.

Regardless, there is definitely such a thing as making the known world more legible to AI today. Thus, people are talking about increasing funding for data availability and the possible demise of the “research paper.”

Research papers are more like stories than facts. The demand for stories is not going away, but I definitely cannot predict the future of the write-for-pay scientist.

AI, potentially, could go and get its own new data, instead of waiting for humans to archive it. Thus, the self-improving AI might take us beyond the current models… unless they run up against something that is not legible to intelligence…

Freddy and Tocquevillian Hope

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We made it to 250! Some people didn’t even think we would make it this long. Happy 4th of July!

I have seen America 250 merchandise and banners all over this year. American patriotism was not so cool a decade ago, and it’s interesting to see the displays back in.

An example of the “USA Merch” seen all over this year. This was near Chattanooga, TN (which is the city the Spanish national team picked for their World Cup training base).

Something that has been fun this year was watching the 2026 Winter Olympics and the ongoing World Cup hosted here (Remember we went around the moon? People are just watching soccer now). People have told me how much fun they had either witnessing or hearing about Scottish World Cup fans partying in Boston. Fun is back, at least in one sense.

Americans enjoy winning. Getting knocked out of the World Cup early would have been disappointing. But most Americans don’t care if we completely win the World Cup. In fact, fun mode is highest if we get to watch someone else enjoy a victory. A nontrivial percent of Americans were genuinely rooting for Cape Verde.

For EconLog, I wrote a piece about Freddy the German World Cup tourist.

Freddy the World Cup Tourist and Tocqueville’s Hopes for America

At the link, I present Freddy and his Twitter/X posts as evidence that some of Tocqueville’s highest hopes have been fulfilled, so far.

If you go looking for Freddy, as of when I checked on July 3, he has deactivated his X account. With nearly a million followers he probably could have become a paid influencer, but he does not want to. I suppose he wants to return to Germany and live a more stable life. He never expected to get this much attention.

Edit: Freddy is back! https://x.com/freddyla7/status/2076724002031104233?s=46

Video on You Wouldn’t Steal a Car

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The brilliant content creator economist Matt Hill has posted a video “How Piracy Accidentally Created AI” to the @EconNerds channel on YouTube.

The video is so funny (and smart!) that I encourage you to sit back and watch it all the way through. Around minute 2, he gets to the topic of online piracy.

The 4 minute mark is where I am featured to explain my paper with Bart Wilson: You Wouldn’t Steal a Car: Moral Intuition for Intellectual Property (SSRN link)

The @EconNerds channel on YouTube has over 100 engaging videos like this to help you learn economics. You can also find Econ Nerds updates on X/Twitter

I summarized our findings in a previous blog “Summary of You Wouldn’t Steal a Car,” but Matt’s video is more fun and quite technically accurate, so now everyone can just watch it.

Reviews from Joy

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Lately I’ve been experiencing personal advertising barrages. Sometimes, I actually buy a product online before realizing that I had been living in a fake information environment complete with fake AI-generated product reviews. What I want for myself right now is to hear more product reviews from real people. I’m not against earning money from affiliate links, but I will earn nothing from this post. Here’s what I’m using right now.

Sourdough Bread Baking gear kit – I got a kit with “bannetons” (if you’re not interested, don’t ask) back when I decided to get into sourdough baking. The appeal was the savings from buying it all in a bundle (i.e. “dough whisk,” etc.). The investment is worthwhile if you are going to make your own sourdough bread. As I wrote earlier, this is a big investment of time. I do not recommend starting the process at all if you will make homemade bread less than 5 times a year.

Homemade Driveway Pickleball Court – if you have a paved level driveway or large patio, you might be able to create a non-regulation-sized Pickleball court. It used to be that billionaires could have their own tennis court and the rest of us could have ping pong tables. Now there is a Third Thing. You will likely need to rig up nets as a backstop by piecing together sports gear meant for baseball backstops. The actual mid-court net can come cheap from Amazon (I went with 14 feet wide). A small Pickleball court is fun for children/teens, but adults will prefer going to a real court where you can hit the ball much harder. Pickleball facilities are appearing all over the country and many cities now provide free courts in parks and gyms.

Canvas LMS and New Quizzes – Samford University uses Canvas, and I have always liked the interface. Finally, in the year 2026, I have decided to build a new course using “New Quizzes” instead of Classic Quizzes. The rollout of this product has been so awkward, but if you are starting from scratch, Item Banks and “New Quizzes” works well now.

The book Misbehaving by Richard Thaler is about his career and the field of Behavioral Economics. I think anyone could learn from how the field evolves in the face of new evidence. It’s been helpful for me with my project on LLMs and financial decision making.

Codex – Thanks to Codex, I can finally do something teaching-related that ChatGPT had failed to do for me in summer of 2025. Codex can write straight to a subfolder on my computer, with coaching. For technical details, follow Aniket. What I used to say to people who wanted to “learn computer programming” is that it’s impossible to learn from reading books. Build something that you care about, even if it is just a tiny website. I would say the same for Codex. Use it to build something, even if that’s something for your personal life like a sourdough bread baking scheduling assistant.

Continue reading →

Fast Food Was Solved Before Fast Fashion

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Ozempic is not new anymore, and my friend is now losing weight on Wegovy. The miracle of science has been incredible to watch, because I know how difficult it was to lose weight by just trying to change habits before while the cravings persisted. (None of this is medical advice. These drugs are not for everyone.)

I have written about how the global apparel industry created something historically remarkable: a world in which almost everyone has abundant clothing in many styles. For most of human history, clothing was expensive and scarce. Today, Shein sells a dress for $8 and ships it to your door in a week.

The critics of fast fashion focus on the downsides: textile waste, carbon emissions, and low-wage labor. These concerns are prompting efforts to restrict or tax this abundance, as French lawmakers are now attempting with Shein.

Food abundance has some parallels with textile abundance. Once food became cheap, many people started complaining that we consume too much of it. We cannot seem to get it just right with consumption.

For most of human history, the primary nutritional problem was not having enough to eat. Famine was recurring and childhood hunger was normal. Innovation and globalization resulted in food abundance for most people. Caloric availability per person has risen dramatically.

The unintended consequence of that success is the fast-food era: a world in which cheap calories are engineered for palatability in ways that overwhelm the body’s natural satiety mechanisms. We solved scarcity, but now we have to deal with the abundance paradox.

These two abundance problems (clothes and calories) are at different stages of resolution.

The fast fashion critics are still waiting for their solution. The alternatives to disposable clothing seem to be either to get more expensive clothes or to change an entire culture (which rarely happens without violence). The political response of implementing bans or taxes amounts to restricting the abundance rather than addressing its side effects. Nobody has invented the equivalent of a metabolic thermostat for textile waste.

Fast food, by contrast, has just received something extraordinary: a drug that quietly recalibrates the neurochemical machinery driving overconsumption.

Continue reading →

Joy Explains how to integrate AI into a statistics class

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I have put a working paper on SSRN describing three ways I incorporated AI into my Business Statistics 200-level class for undergraduates at Samford University in Spring 2026. Read the paper at the link.

Connecting Classroom Econometrics and Excel Training with Large Language Models (SSRN)

Abstract
Economics education almost always includes a component of statistics. Most undergraduate economics curricula require an upper-division econometrics course, and many economists teach data analysis. These courses help students become conversant with major contributions in economics research, but they can be challenging to teach. On its own, the mathematics of regression, error minimization, and statistical software may not feel exciting to students, especially compared with the intuitive economic reasoning that often draws them into the discipline. At the same time, students are increasingly interested in artificial intelligence and large language models. This note describes three practical teaching exercises designed to connect ordinary least squares, Excel training, and LLMs. The goal is to use students’ curiosity about AI to motivate classic statistical reasoning and practical spreadsheet skills.

The image is from ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking mode and it took over a minute to generate. The fact that their laptop screen is pointing away from them is funny (unrealistic). The portrayal of Tom Holland and Zendaya is good, which is what the audience cares about. So, this seems like a case of AI hallucinating up the thing that people want.

I posted back in February about the LLM Telephone game: Telephone Classroom Game for Teaching Large Language Models

Citation:
Buchanan, Joy, “Connecting Classroom Econometrics and Excel Training with Large Language Models” (May 27, 2026). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6839039

Note: I have been posting my papers to SSRN for a long time as a way to distribute them faster and more widely. I have heard rumors that SSRN might stop working, for my purposes. If anyone has suggestions for what I should do about the papers I have up there, please let me know! Or, if you are readying this post-summer-2026 and want a copy, send me a message at my Samford email so I can send you a copy.

Would you steal a lemon?

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My latest at EconLog is

Would Hasan Piker Steal A Car?

Click the link above to read but here are some quotes:

Hasan Piker implied that he might steal a car if it carried no consequences. In the interview, author Jia
Tolentino also casually admits to shoplifting lemons from Whole Foods. Although petty theft is common, the interview clip spread quickly …

In my recent paper with Bart Wilson, “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car: Moral Intuition for Intellectual Property,” we test how people think about taking different types of goods.

What would Piker think of a world where the “microlooting” he claims to approve happens at scale?

Someone I Know is Taking Wegovy

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This person is buying the pills direct from the supplier, in consultation with a doctor. It is amazing. Resurrection. The Great Stagnation is over. Go get this stuff. It’s funny how many people are already on it, but it doesn’t come up until you initiate a conversation.

As a behavioral economist… it’s pretty wild. Folks were eating things that part of themselves wanted to eat and part of themselves did not want to eat. And, instead of getting rid of the junk food, or somehow training people out of overeating, we’ve chemically quieted the desires.

I feel like the healthy people could have done more on choice architecture, in the old days (pre-2025). It was hard for the people trying to lose weight to avoid junk food. I’m not trying to introduce the boot of the state into kids’ birthday cakes but just pausing to reflect on how many people died because of our choices. Humans are supposed to just walk past an aisle of candy bars? (My parents explicitly and intentionally trained me from a young age to never buy anything at the “check out aisle” because it’s always going to be a stupid impulse purchase. As an adult, I buy a chocolate bar at check out about once a year and feel like I’m getting away with robbing a children’s hospital.)

Here’s Paul pondering these issues 2000 years ago (shortened by me):
Romans 7:15-19
15 I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. 16 And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. … For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.

Joy: I think on net glp1 will increase fertility relative to not having it. It seems like good news for folks reaching their (reportedly) desired number of children. But I would not count on it to turn any country around to get back to replacement.

arXiv will ban authors who submit papers with LLM mistakes

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In the world of academic preprints, arXiv has long been the go-to platform for researchers to share work quickly. But with the explosion of generative AI tools, the repository is drawing a line in the sand.

On May 14, 2026, arXiv moderator Thomas Dietterich announced a clarified enforcement policy. If a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that authors didn’t properly check LLM-generated content, all listed authors face serious consequences.

What counts as “Incontrovertible Evidence”? The policy targets clear signs of unchecked AI output, including:

  • Hallucinated or fake references
  • Meta-comments left by the model (e.g., “Here is a 200-word summary; would you like me to make any changes?” or placeholder instructions like “fill in the real numbers from your experiments”)
  • Other obvious errors, plagiarized text, biased content, or misleading claims generated by AI

arXiv’s Code of Conduct already holds every author fully responsible for the entire paper’s contents.

The Penalty

  • One-year ban from submitting new papers to arXiv.
  • After the ban, future submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue before arXiv will host them.

At first researchers discussing the policy online seemed happy about the one-year ban, but when I pointed out that it is essentially a ban for life to use it at a pre-print venue, some people became nervous.

Why now? arXiv has been overwhelmed by low-effort “AI slop.” These papers are marked by fabricated citations and shallow summaries. This erodes trust in the entire preprint ecosystem.

In response to the complaints (someone like me would be worried that I’ll somehow let an error slip through and then be banned for life from posting working papers), Scientific Director Steinn Sigurðsson shared:

on the whole @arxiv flap about hallucinated references etc

you don’t see the stuff we reject… some of it is really really egregious

the decision to impose additional consequences is largely to throttle that stuff so n00bs and bad actors don’t trash us trying repeatedly

This is the problem that we face with every internet forum. A few bad actors ruin it for good people.

In 2022 I wrote Content moderation strategy

Elon Musk buying Twitter is the big news this week. He wants to enhance free speech on the site and, according to him, make it more open and fun. Some fans are hoping that he will make the content moderation and ban policy more transparent. Maybe that’s possible. 

If no one can be banned, then bad actors will bring the whole platform down. Inevitably, good people get caught in the net, and it’s devastating to be locked out of a platform where your peers are sharing.

However, if you want to be taken seriously by tech folk then ask for a system that is possible. A substantially better experience might be incompatible with the site being free to users.

Part of the problem that I don’t hear people talking about is that a free platform is not easily compatible with good customer service.

For some not-fake work and citations: Buchanan et al. (2024) provided early clear evidence that a mark of LLM-written work is fake citations. And, Buchanan and Hickman (2024) show that certain framings can prompt people to be more suspicious of AI-generated writing, such that they are pushed toward doing a fact-check before believing all claims.

Buchanan, Joy, and William Hickman. “Do people trust humans more than ChatGPT?.” Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics 112 (2024): 102239.

Buchanan, Joy, Stephen Hill, and Olga Shapoval. “ChatGPT hallucinates non-existent citations: Evidence from economics.” The American Economist 69.1 (2024): 80-87.