Discussion

starkparker: This is a genuinely useful tool with a shitty self-sabotaging name.

jonahx: Name seems fine. Catchy, and I knew what I did before opening link.

chromacity: Like the original Grammarly, I think this can be useful for business writing because they help you get to the point. Many students are rewarded for using flowery language in school essays, but if you're composing an email or writing a design doc, just optimize for reading time and clarity.But for general use, I think this is misguided. The problem with LLM output is not that it's using em dashes or words such as "crucial". It's that most LLM articles on LinkedIn or on personal blogs just take a one-sentence prompt and dress it up into a lot of pointless words, wasting everyone's time: "I had a shower thought and I asked a chatbot to write five pages of text about it." I don't need prettier words, I need there to be fewer of them?

kstrauser: LOL. I copied and pasted an 87-word blog post I wrote yesterday, on my phone, via my own thumbs. It detected 4 likely AI patterns, or once every 22 words.I'm so over this idiocy. It's gotten to the point that the "haha, gotcha!" AI claims are more annoying than AI slop itself. God forbid you use a semicolon or an em dash or an interesting sentence structure to break things up, because someone will be quick to point out the "proof" that it's machine generated.

awnist: It isn’t an AI detector. It flags valid language patterns that have become LLM-output clichés through overuse. False positives are a given.and I'll never give up on em dashes

nz: I've taken to telling people, that if they see me write a long piece, that lacks em-dashes, then they should assume that I am under duress, and send help.

rdmuser: I've been wanting something like this for a while now but as an extension that runs locally. Just something I can click to get a quick response telling me if the article seems like ai so I can focus on the writing without needing to spend energy on remembering ai styles and detecting obvious ai. I'd be pretty happy to see something like that built straight into firefox.Ultimately slop is so pervasive that I'm wasting a fair amount of time vetting text and it's affecting my ability to simply enjoy reading. I keep getting part way into an article before realizing it's low quality ai writing. Being able to get a quick heads up that it looks like ai before starting would save me a lot of energy even on articles I decide to try reading because it cuts down on mental overhead.

tavavex: This is a confused and misguided project. It makes the mistake of failing to identify why the AI 'style' feels wrong. The author decided to replicate similar tools by breaking down AI writing into bite-sized issues, but it just doesn't work the same way as correcting grammatical errors. Because of this, the author had to really try to find what's so wrong about these patterns in isolation, so all of it comes off as annoying nitpicks. Let's take a look at a few.> Overused Intensifier - Delete it. If the sentence still makes sense, the word was never needed. If it doesn't, rewrite the sentence to show why it matters.You heard it here first. Adjectives? More like AIdjectives, a covert plan by AI companies to make our writing more sloppy. According to this recommendation, writing should never have any emphasis, it should only contain the most basic "X is Y" relations, like in some programming language. Sentences should contain the bare minimum amount of information required to parse them, everything else must be cut. In practice, this recommendation only filters a few of the most pervasive 'corporate PowerPoint'-style language, but even then, the suggestion that these words are never useful is wrong.> Triple Construction - Break the pattern. Use two items or four. Or convert one item into its own sentence to give it more weight.Humans may really like when things are structured into threes, but you must resist this AI temptation! Use two or four points, because you're not like them. The only reason cited for why this is wrong is that LLMs use this pattern often, so naturally the rest of us must cede good writing practices to them.> "Almost" Hedge - Commit. "Almost always" → "usually." Or just say "always" and defend the claim. Readers notice when you won't take a stance.As we all know, the world is discrete and easy to describe. That's why there simply isn't anything between things that happen "usually" (70%) and "always" (100%). Saying "almost always" (95%) is bad, because you should round your estimates and defend what is now an obviously wrong statement, for it makes you seem more brutal and confident.> "Broader Implications" - State the implication explicitly, or cut the phrase. "This has broader implications" says nothing. What are the implications? Say them.God forbid you organize an essay that's in any way non-linear, temporarily withholding some information for the sake of organization. Asking to can the phrase entirely says that even complex writing should be strung together in a rigid and sequential order.That's the problem with the project, the way I see it. It was too heavily inspired by Grammarly and the likes, and in chasing it, the criticisms were adapted to fit the Grammarly model. The issue with that LLM 'style' is the punchy, continuous overuse of these patterns to the point where these phrases start seeming like meaningless sound combinations. There's nothing wrong with most of these patterns individually, what I hate is when text is filled with them to the brim, not when they show at all. If your writing is like the example paragraph, with most of the text highlighted, then it's a sign that your essay is more rhetoric than substance. But if you write an argument with three items in it and it's highlighted because "that's like AI" to make you delete it, then that's performative self-censorship, not improving your writing.

aesthesia: I think this would come off a lot better if the recommendations weren't so absolute. I like the effect of a multicolored slab of highlights calling out every LLM cliche in a passage. Yes, the slop style is not just the sum of these individual patterns, but they're definitely significant contributors to the effect, and they're worth being aware of in your own writing regardless of their association with LLMs. You just can't treat it as a list of must-resolve errors (same as with any writing feedback, really).

alexjurkiewicz: And it's unnecessarily rude. Grammarly and Hemingway can identify the same sort of issues without "you are a stupid robot" vibes.

ameliaquining: It seems relevant that a lot of these things were fairly notorious clichés even before LLMs, which just intensified the phenomenon. They were what people tended to do who wanted to sound smart and sophisticated but didn't have a developed voice or anything in particular to say. Indeed, I'm fairly sure this is why LLMs sound like this.

justzisguyuknow: Indeed,

furyofantares: Removing the aesthetic tells from LLM-generated text won't fix the fact that there's nobody home with opinions and experiences to express. It will just make it take more work for your unsuspecting audience to figure that out.

Swizec: > "I had a shower thought and I asked a chatbot to write five pages of text about it." I don't need prettier words, I need there to be fewer of them?Always judge an author by the length of their text.Decades of insights barely condensed into 200 pages? Great! Hours of thought expanded into 200 pages? Very bad.Same length of text but lands very differently. Same is true for emails, tweets, videos, and even just talking. Say less! But not too little either.

iamjs: I'm enjoying pasting early 2000's era blog posts in here and learning that they too were LLM slop!

cjlm: I find it funny that all of these little tools lean into the slop = poop dynamic.I'm building writetrack.dev - a writing signal sdk that helps folks understand proof of process. It takes a different approach to writing analysis and I'm pretty sure the logo will never feature a brown turd.

keybored: AI is so original that it can’t make cliches out of decently-worn phrases and constructions by itself.

gus_massa: It's just following what the prompt says, something like:fake prompt> To sound smart, use as much literary tricks from LinkedIn Grow Hackers as possible.If they prompt asked to sound like Strawberry Shortcake, the AI pudding would be full of berry interesting cooking analogies.

ameliaquining: The interesting thing is that LLMs sound kind of like LinkedIn Growth Hackers even if you don't explicitly tell them to do that, unless you instead tell them to sound like something else. (And even then, there are still similarities.)

Mistletoe: >Staccato Burst.Now I have a name for the thing I despise the most about AI writing.

edaemon: Yeah, this comic summarizes the issue pretty well: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html

3eb7988a1663: Wow! Did you know that Abraham Lincoln let AI write the Gettysburg Address? 17 patterns identified out of only 305 words. I don't know why I ever let him get the ad revenue.

krackers: Isn't this called the tricolon? Ironically the names of the patterns all seem AI generated.

lemagedurage: Yeah, "don't overuse these patterns" is the right attitude for tools like this, not "fix all mistakes". And that's OK?

SkiFreeWin3: Project doing something similar: http://slopwash.comCleans up content. Less about critiquing and giving feedback, more just “give me the better output”

layer8: A lot of these things were well-known clichés already before LLMs, used by people who wanted to sound sophisticated but weren't articulate or didn't have anything to say. That's why LLMs sound like that.

littlexsparkee: So many books that could've been an article. I try to save myself time by checking Goodreads but it's not always clear as I'm more critical than the average person. Reading a preview in Google Books helps but you only get so many pages before you're cut off. Appreciate that lately new books are sometimes featured in pubs with an excerpt.

korse: The feedback needs to go away or this thing is just exacerbating the problem. Give a slop score if you must but then shut up and let the user interpret the result as they see fit.Slop is stopped by allowing unique quirks to flourish. Do you speak in 'staccato bursts'? THEN FUCKING WRITE IN STACCATO BURSTS! Do you need a 'throat clearing opener? THEN FUCKING USE ONE!Human language does not need to take progressive steps toward some universal standard. Having one is fine, in theory, but the beauty lies in how we solve for our inability to consistently utilize it. Adding mechanism to every step removes the beauty. Stop being the problem.

Chaosvex: Agreed. I ran some human-authored technical articles through this and most (all?) of the suggestions were just stripping the personality out of the writing. Kind of ironic.

lemagedurage: It looks like tricolon is about specifically three parallel elements, while staccato is about short consecutive sentences, so staccato would be the appropriate name here.

jedbrooke: Honestly, I get pretty good improvement from just adding a “Emoji are forbidden” and a small list of banned words and phrases (the usual suspects like “it’s not just x, it’s y” etc)

lokar: As a senior engineer I spend a lot of time reviewing and approving technical designs, PRDs etc.Over the years the amount of basic copy editing I have to do has really grown. I sometimes feel like I’m removing 20%+ of the text. And that was before LLMs.

lotyrin: It's not purporting to be an LLM detector. Your 2000s era posts probably do have some sloppy cliches in them.

slopinthebag: > Many students are rewarded for using flowery language in school essaysNot to nitpick, but I actually had the opposite experience in uni. My prof docked me marks for my flowery language, and honestly, good for her, my lazy writing style honestly sucks (see how I used "honestly" twice in the same sentence, lol).Not to take away from your post or anything, just realising I got lucky with my prof. I agree that LLMs produce way too much output when generating writing (and code too!)

0gs: ... the problem is it is rude to LLMs? i think they can handle it.

resters: If prompted appropriately, LLMs can write prose that mirrors nearly any style you ask for. Not sure what the big hubbub about "slop" is. Honestly it's annoying.