How I feel about LLM (AI) writing
I love writing, it's one of the most human things about humanity. It's communication, art and sharing all at once. It's been fundamental to culture and progress for 1000's of years.
LLMs are, in a way, really good at writing. They have the larger part of human creative output distilled into their weights. So it was inevitable that more and more people would start publishing articles and blog posts written (all or in part) by AI agents.
I don't like it but I accept it, there really isn't anything I can do about it. What I was hoping, though, is that high signal to noise ratio places on the internet (Tildes among them) would reject it and we could go on consuming 100% organic prose, at least for a while.
And for while that's exactly what happened. In techy places like Hacker News, AI posts were quickly flagged and downvoted into oblivion. At Tildes they mostly didn't show up at all, or if they did I missed them.
That seems to be ending though. Now I see agent written pieces on the front page of HN with 100's of comments. There's always a highly upvoted comment pointing out that the piece is slop, but you have to scroll to find it.
The reason I use HN as an example is that it's full of people with extensive experience using AI agents who are in a position to tell if something is slop. And it looks like the larger part of readers (or at least commenters) can't tell the difference anymore. If that's true at HN, it's going to be true everywhere.
It is getting harder to tell when something is slop, people are post editing, handwriting intros and getting better at prompting to remove obvious LLM tells. But if you have any practical experience with these tools, it's still pretty easy to tell. Somewhere during post training certain patterns end up getting heavily favored. Interestingly, many of them happen across all of the frontier models. Em-dashes are the most famous but there are so many more. Most are rhetorical tricks or formatting patterns rather than punctuation.
Reading LLM prose, many of the tropes don't stand out at first, instead they land as strong writing. But after you see them repeat enough times they start to become obvious. Even putting the tropes aside, the hallmark of a lot of LLM writing is that it's more rhetoric than substance. Low signal, lots of noise.
I don't have a solution, it's starting to look like many (maybe most) people aren't going to be able to tell when they're consuming something that required minimal thought by the "author" who prompted the AI. Which is sad because, up until now, we could assume that, when we read something, someone cared enough to put time and mental bandwidth into creating it. That's become increasingly less true.
I suppose this post is me feeling wistful for the internet we used to have, written exclusively by humans. I continue to hope that people will reject slop at places like Tildes, but in order for them to do that they have to be able to identify it. Maybe people will get better at that, there is definitely a point where you've consumed enough slop that you can smell it from a mile away. But of course the slop is going to keep getting harder to detect.
I don't want to go as far as to say that slop will take over the internet, I think (hope) that people will keep wanting to read organic, human, writing. And that as a result we'll come up with strategies and solutions to support that.
It's a weird time. Right now every LLM blog post and article that goes viral is signalling to the prompter, and anyone watching who can tell what's happening, that there is demand for slop. And of course with demand comes profit. I think we're at the beginning of a steep curve.
I think it's more that HN commenters either just read the title and not the article, or that they don't care anymore and are more interested in discussing the prompted topic.
It's true that human writing feels more authentic and I often prefer handmade items to mass-produced plastic garbage. I empathize and also yearn for simpler times when spam was simple Markov chains. But eventually the complaining about slop becomes its own noise.
On reddit you just have bots posting slop and bots complaining about slop. The dead internet theory has fully arrived at its terminus.
I strongly agree, and this has definitely gotten worse over the past five years. I think that Tildes has the right solution: have the submitter share excerpts and comments about the article to frame the discussion. This removes friction and gets other users to engage more than superficially.
I don't think this is done unilaterally, ime đ when I (rarely) share an article, I include excerpts so because skybrian does it, as I'd found it useful. But it's just a cultural thing, and tonnes of articles are posted without excerpts. I agree that it's cool that it's become a cultural thing, though, for the reasons you outline!
Yeah, I donât really do this, but I will start doing it.
I really enjoy it when someone posts an article adding their own commentary: reason for posting, whether they agree or disagree with the author, some key takeaways, etc. I'm much more inclined to engage in the conversation when the OP does this! Even if the article actually sucks, or isn't very high quality, a high quality conversation can still be had about it here on Tildes. :)
I try and post commentary, but Iâm often too lazy to post snippets of the text as well.
Anything that you can add to the post being just a plain link is already great!
While it's nice to have thoughtful high effort posts on here, it would also be a shame if people didn't post interesting things because the quality bar is too high to clear. So please don't feel obligated to add anything in case you don't happen to have the time or energy.
I usually try to insert excerpts, especially when the site has a paywall. I want people on Tildes to get an idea of the content.
I also often add my opinion, but sometimes I think I shouldn't do this because the link and excerpts usually make the case without that.
I wish I had something more optimistic to add, other than... same. I used to love the internet because I loved the open exchange of ideas that transcended space and language and border. Text used to be a decent barrier; I gravitated towards text-heavy communities like Tildes (and, once upon a time, HN, and parts of Reddit, and even certain Facebook communities back in the day). Everything has become infested with low-quality jokes, memes, and outright spam, leaving me my last bastions of sanity, like Tildes. HN has had problems for a long time, but the bot presence has become utterly unbearable lately.
These grassroots communities are dying, replaced with utterly soulless astroturfing.
I fear we've somehow implemented Dead Internet Theory. In a way it'll be nice to touch grass and use the internet less. But I'll miss the friends, the sense of community, the learning, and most of all the reminder of just how big and varied the world can be. It was amazing to wander onto the internet and find other nerds like yourself, whatever niche you care about most. But I guess most people are fine replacing that with homogeneous undifferentiated slop. It makes me very sad. I wonder where (if?) the next generation finds a way to create those niche communities, because it's clear that those nerd spaces are anathema to the capitalist urges of our techno overlords.
It would be nice to see more third places show up in meatspace, but that's also being ruined by our oligarchs. So I really don't know what to hope for. Maybe a nice solar flare that could knock out 99% of modern computers and leave people OK? Aliens?
I don't really disagree with anything you wrote, but as a small note of hope, I don't think that most people are fine or even indifferent. It's more that it doesn't take much effort to prompt and post AI slop, so the people doing that can easily overwhelm any forum's immune system. Though... Yeah, people don't actually read past the headline. That's not new with AI, but it's definitely worse now.
YouTube comments always had a reputation for being the most brain dead place for internet discourse, but lately, if I scroll the comments of any somewhat popular video in unsigned-in YouTube, it depresses me.
Not only is it braindead, but the top comments always follow the same exact 10 or so meme templates that for some reason have been the same for the past decade or so.
"X: am I a joke to you?"
"Nobody:
X: Y!!!!!"
"tfw x"
"Me when I x"
And so on
I have to assume these are all very young kids, because the alternative fills me with a strange feeling of dread.
I think this depends heavily on what videos you're watching, which lends credence to the idea that it's all young kids. I've found Youtube comments on a lot of channels I follow have gotten a lot better than they once were, but it still depends more on which channel I'm watching even among those I subscribe to.
Intuitively, we associate long and elegant writing with deep thought.
People are constantly being led astray but this intuition.
Sadly, many people barely read beyond the headline.
Yes, itâs very much an intuition thing, IMO.
(Dick Guindon)
I think this quote succinctly captures why we value written thought; itâs been refined at least once from after the thoughtâs initial inception.
I just wanted to add my 2¢ to the discussion. I think this has been brewing for a while culturally. 24 hour news cycles lead to more news being written, and less care put into followup stories than the new headline. I know it's a bad habit of my own to not read past the headlines in many cases. Some of that also has to do with bad news sites, ad spam, and popups. We are incentivized to not read past the headline.
I don't know how we fix it. I'm trying to spend less time on my phone and more time with paper books.
Theyâre not actually. Theyâre really average at writing. Almost definitionally so. Itâs just that most people are really crap at writing so grammatically correct sentences structured to communicate a point from beginning to end rather than stream-of-consciousness rambling seems like some kind of cheat code to them.
But if you read it, itâs a really shallow book-report level of analysis being dressed up to seem more impressive than it is by very professional sounding prose. This is one of the reasons people who keep saying these tools are going to make humanities disciplines disappear are batshit insane. Really good reading skills are essential for being able to use these things and navigating the associated cognito-hazards. If you become reliant on them your critical thinking skills are going to get sandblasted away.
That's a really good summary of a lot of AI writing currently.
As far as the humanities, I agree completely but I'm still concerned about what it will look like a year from now. It's possible they'll never be able to approach thoughtful human level output, but it's too early to tell.
I completely share this sentiment! In addition to asking how we can recognise and avoid exposing ourselves to slop, I think it's also worth asking why people would even decide to post slop content in the first place (excluding criminals where the incentives are obvious).
I'm a member of a private Reddit sub with people from all walks of life. I haven't seen any slop posts or comments on there even though most of outer Reddit is a slop fest beyond repair.
I think the reason is pretty straightforward: connection is a basic human need. If we communicate by prompting a machine who writes our lines for us, we miss out on the opportunity to connect and feel truly connected to whomever responds. So, generally speaking, we have the incentive to express ourselves directly, in our own words that reflect our true personality and come straight from our heart.
However, in an environment that seems unpredictable or outright hostile, some people will resort to a crutch. As many public online spaces are becoming increasingly risky, sloppifying their own output is a layer of protection some people will resort to in an attempt to safeguard themselves emotionally. It doesn't really work because you won't actually experience the benefits of real connection without putting yourself on the line, but it may give you enough of a dopamine boost to keep you hooked.
Even before gen AI was a thing, there were always some people who wrote and spoke in a similarly sloppy way, with lots of words but very little to say. I believe the reason they developed that communication style is the same: insecurity, a need to create an impressive facade that hides the emptiness behind it (if only temporarily). It was always exhausting but thankfully those people weren't very common. Not because insecure people weren't common but because speaking that way is a skill that takes quite a bit of effort to develop, and not many humans were equipped for that. Now that the technical obstacle has been removed due to ubiquitous access to LLMs, we see an avalanche of this all over the internet.
My "solution" is to just make sure that places like Tildes remain as emotionally safe as possible, and have some system that doesn't let just any number of bots or completely random people to create accounts and start posting. I'm really pleased that this place already had both of these things in place years ago! In times like these they are even more important than before.
I'm curious about how to contribute to this : recently I've seen a rise in .... discourse temperature? That despite society being an opt-out-able Tildes, that there are a number of articles that really get everyone going :< because the posted articles do touch on important issues and these are times where we feel like we need to defend important views .....
I thought about saying something like "this sounds like the kind of thing that just gets us all upset at each other so I'm going to opt out and encourage everyone to do the same". But that's counterproductive isn't it. Meanwhile simply not voting for it doesn't help either.
Circling back to @post_below, I would very much like a heads-up that something is slop, or at least not entirely human generated. You know how we have a noise tag? Is there an.... Opt in where we could subscribe to a "potential AI" tag? But that becomes a shadow ban then eh, with arguments and being defensive or false positives..... =..=
\ 'v' / * offers hug
Extra hug from someone else who often has to "nope" out of the discourse.
Extra offer of hug as well :D
Online discourse can contain some of the best aspects of human interactions: nobody has to feel obligated to participate; we don't have to fill awkward dead air; if we wait a few hours or even days before coming back to the conversation, it hasn't "moved on"; there's time for translation apps or hunting for an expression in a second language; we can kind of skim if we're watching out for our own health; we don't have to invest in facial expression management if we just want to passively listen to others....
All that to say, good job taking care of yourself and
hopenope out as needed, and I value your participation when you could afford to do soThank you - I appreciate the forbearance! With all that's being said about the increase in intemperate arguments, it's still important to me that Tildes isn't an in-your-face social media app with constant notifications badgering for responses.
There are many people here whom I'd be delighted to interact with in face-to-face conversation, you among them. But in the electronically mediated world, we have to be very conscious about when and how to respond. It's normal to maintain a level of interpersonal guardedness that can feel oppressive and exhausting, due to the lack of the physical signals that we've evolved to perceive for emotional/physical safety and conflict avoidance.
I have an imposed awareness of the limitations on my time and emotional energy, as well as my ability to contribute positively with knowledge, experience, and empathy. As /u/286437714 said, there are just too many events in the world that are worthy of incandescent rage. Our ability to gather and share valid information about them, coordinate on responses, and act meaningfully is being intentionally exhausted, eroded, and drowned out through slop, greenwashing, propaganda, ragebait, and a hundred other infowar strategies.
It's hard to pull back and stay out when I see a segment of Tildes users who are habitually promoting the latest alt-right inflected lines of online argument, but I think it's effective to deny them the attention they seem to be seeking. I know things have gone way past "don't feed the trolls", especially when they've learned to be more subtle in sealioning and demanding "evidence". I still believe noping-out is a good habit from the days of healthier forums.
Yeah, so the issue with an AI tag - in addition to what you already listed - is that some human generated slop is equally awful. Making the distinction will seem unfair to those who use LLMs to write because the end result is the same or similar. To the people who want to have a slop free space, there is a difference because human generated slop is rare and will remain rare enough to not cause issues, so avoiding AI generated slop will adequately take care of the issue.
How to contribute to a safe space? Make sure your own behaviour is respectful, but not overly respectful towards slop, because as stated above, slop is a concealment device and using it makes other people feel less safe to expose themselves authentically. If slop becomes ubiquitous, it will systemically reduce authentic participation by everyone, including the people who wouldn't use AI themselves (they will simply post and comment less).
In the end it comes down to developing and maintaining good boundaries:
Even if someone wrote a very long post using 100% their own effort, you don't have a moral obligation to read it (and if they did so using AI, it would be unethical of them to expect people to read it). I read long posts in a cursory way to see if it's worth reading mindfully from start to finish. This may sound harsh but most posts are not. In most cases the author could have worked on the text to reduce it by 80% and still retained what they wanted to say (I am often guilty of missing this step myself!). If they didn't put in that effort, they have no right to expect me to pick up the slack for them by working extra hard to decipher their message. I may comment on just one sentence I actually want to say something about, or I may not comment at all. If they are disappointed that they aren't getting engagement for the entire post, maybe next time they'll make sure to write a more concise post with less fluff and tangents. They could even use an LLM to help with that. (And I would approve!)
If someone is directly responding to your comment to them, there's a higher obligation for you to read and engage, but still not a full obligation. Generally speaking, the longer a response, the higher the chance that it contains non-constructive elements or patterns: manipulation, moving the goalposts, obfuscation of what the conversation is about, etc.
NB!! These patterns can and will exist even when the person exhibiting them is completely benevolent in their conscious mind. We all have unexamined blind spots that affect our behaviour. We can't expect other people to get rid of all their blind spots to make a safe space for us but we can manage our own engagement level.
In my experience an effective way to respond to lengthy, ranty comments is to keep the response much shorter and to the point. Just respond to the part that is about the actual topic and ignore all the tangents as if they don't exist. Don't waste energy pointing out that something is off topic or is rude, or whatever. That's still rewarding because it got you to engage. There are cases when it's important to point out someone is being rude, but if you decide to do that, keep it extremely short and to the point and then don't engage further unless you feel completely willing and able to do so lovingly.
If the response doesn't address the topic at all, it's also okay to not respond at all. Even if the response does address the topic but fails to acknowledge something you already said earlier, it's okay to disengage until that changes (usually it won't, but at least you haven't wasted your own resources).
If you feel that you're getting emotional over a conversation, it's okay to take some time before coming back to it. This helps you avoid writing from your own blind spots.
Make constructive, mindful conversation worthwhile. Say thank you, share how someone else's caring attitude made a positive impact on you, etc. Spend most of your time engaging in conversations that feel genuinely valuable and constructive to you. If there are none available, try starting one yourself.
Thank you, Lia, I've been thinking mechanical interventions, and entirely neglected the very human things I should have been doing and can still do, so, much appreciation for taking the time and your suggestions. Several points I liked:
Engage with quality, whether or not AI asissted; spend less time on disorganized posts, even if it's a human thought. It's not the tool that's the problem, it's the carelessness and or inflammatory nature of it.
I struggle with 1 and 2: the obligation to engage and response, due to projection: I am myself sloppy and rambling, and if I want others to look past it I should be prepared to do the same. But you are offering a far better alternative: that I could ask more of myself and less of others, to engage with more intentionality.
I'd like to add that above I'm intentionally conflating AI slop and very verbose, emotionally charged posting/commentary because I find that they represent a similar root problem. Generally speaking I don't think the human version is as bad, simply because at least we still have a direct line of communication open to the human who is writing their own comments (or editing generated comments to ensure legibility). When it's clearly AI, it feels much more like a lost battle because it gives the impression that the person is more engaged with the LLM than they are using their brain to try to internalise the conversation partner's point of view. I haven't personally seen much/any of that on Tildes.
In conclusion, I feel like we have a pretty good conversational culture going on here and I don't think much needs to change for us to maintain it. If exchanges are becoming more heated as some say, then it's a good idea that everyone check our own behaviour a little more diligently. I believe that this will be enough because Tildes has technical features as well that tackle very egregious behaviour quite well - at least I've seen that work in the past.
As well, every meandering post or comment isn't very problematic and I don't think you need to worry about it. I write them myself on the regular because sometimes I just don't have time to write a shorter, more carefully considered version (yes, a shorter format often takes more time to write!). When I do, I accept that the comment or post won't be as well received and as engaging as it could have been. Such is life!
âIf only I had more time, I could have written a shorter (comment)â is an adaptation of a somewhat famous quote. It was only in writing this comment that I thought to check my assumptions about who was the original author, but itâs certainly not who I had in mind!
I love the idea of some sort of slop label, and it wouldn't work for exactly the reasons you mentioned.
I'm terrible at spotting AI. I want to believe it's people, and I want to believe even if it's AI slop that perhaps there's a person hiding behind it who needed to get something off their chest safely, or in English, or couldn't find the words. But there's so much, and what we stand to lose here is so precious....
Is it possible to swap Tildes re-extended profiles? Have a few of us clever cookies tag suspects, then pass the notes to other less suspecting human users? Like, have a community share ? But again that creates a two tiered membership system ....
Have Deimos appint AI Slop Watch, and tag accounts to watch over a period of time, and if there's fishy activity like spawning a lot of other accounts or repeated posting inflammatory things then the root account gets banned?
For whatever it's worth, I don't think people are commenting using AI on Tildes. Or at least I haven't noticed it. Sometimes AI generated posts and articles are shared, but even that doesn't seem to be happening that often (yet). On the rest of the internet it's a different story.
I recall one person has admitted to polishing their comments using AI, because they're a non-native English speaker. But ultimately I care about the quality of the contribution and whether they stand by it more than whether AI was involved. The reason noticeably AI-generated material is so loathed online is largely because they're not good contributions imo.
That's definitely a grey area, I personally wouldn't say there's anything wrong with using AI to translate a thoughtful comment into another language (or clean it up in the same language) but it would also be an easy way to justify outright generated content.
Hard agree on that.
Maybe an "needlessly inflammatory" tag which auto-minimizes the comment?
I know I'm part of this problem, but I'd enjoy a feed-back mechanism and reminder to adapt my tone properly to the local culture. Then again, some inflammatory comment can be justified in some situation?
maybe we could make do with a culture of being extracareful to answer very calmly and call it out (in a spoiler?) when a comment is inflammatory, so we don't get a runaway flame war. I'm not holding my breath.
labeling a comment as Noise is probably the closest equivalent
I've previously stated my sensitivity towards having my comments labeled Noise, but I'd like to, with trepidation, rescind the statement if possible. I've been welcomed for a while now, and the community should absolutely be able to let me know when I am unfairly taking up people's time with Noise.
Sounds good.
not a shadow ban, just a noise tag which autocollapses the comment (IIRC), so it disincentivize growing that branch of the comment tree...
I like that it doesn't require any new tool to be develloped, just uses what we allready have.
I think the type of comment you describe is a big part of why the Noise label was implemented in the first place tbh, as more innocent use-cases are covered by the Off-Topic and Joke labels (which also lower a comment in the rankings but don't iirc auto-collapse it or mute notifications like Noise does).
While not as common, one thing I've noticed that contributes to this rise in tensions is comments that seem like they're 'trapped,' for lack of a better term. This type of comment is always on posts on contentious/controversial topics, are 1-2 sentences, and is usually snarky or sarcastic. They're seemingly designed to bait out a response. However, since they are so short, any meaningful reply necessarily needs to make some assumptions about the original commenter's position. The original commenter can then accuse the responder of not understanding their position, and respond with just an absolute wall of text, which can spiral into a moderately toxic back-and-forth. If the original commenter had spelled out their thoughts on the post from the get-go, this issue might've been avoided
Perhaps this echoes Lia's point about not having the obligation to respond to overly long, or in this example, too short comments. It's tough, because in real life, one might want to listen some more or respond in an encouraging manner --> but I guess especially on heated topics there is more obligation to delicately engage for the sake of the overall community
Edit: typos that should have been caught immediately by one re-read, apologies
Oooh, I'm holding onto "relationship move at the speed of trust".
I do think many of us share the same view, where we engage with familiar names a little differently than with unfamiliar. I wonder, what your thoughts are about potentially missing out on that added level of trust by keeping an account with a name that's rather hard (for most) to remember? I believe Tildes also has another user who uses a set of |Il (pipe, cap i, lower L) characters, who could potentially be confused with a copy cat account. :) personally, I have you tagged on Tildes re-extended and Three Cheers.
I've been Chocobean for so long it's hard to post as an anon account. I kind of like the idea that you all have seen the decent, the bad and the ugly and have little illusions about me being an expert at anything or having a cool head, esp when it comes to certain topics ....
But I think that's what friendship, and Internet friendship, is like too: people might be blessed to see not just your expertise, nor even your anonymity, but as a familiar human person. Just.... I don't know if what you said is true, but I know the kind of person who's saying it. And that's maybe where we still have an edge against machine slop, even when it becomes truth machines and generates the best writing, though we're still a long way off
I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that I'm one of those people that has trouble spotting AI writing. Does anyone here have any guides they can share that would help me get better at spotting the tells?
Ultimately being less confident that you can always spot AI writing is probably a bigger asset, as humans are not super consistent at distinguishing the two on the whole. Most people who think they can easily detect AI are over-confident in their abilities and have no way to actually confirm that they don't get loads of false positives or false negatives -- and they almost certainly get loads of one or the other. Sometimes a certain case will be really obvious, especially when a text is longer, but because AI is trained to mimic the work of real humans, it will always bear a high resemblance to human-created slop, and even automated tools struggle to distinguish it from human-created work consistently. We don't need more people starting witch-hunts against humans because their work felt too AI-y, so I wouldn't emphasize trying to learn to identify what's AI work. Learning to quickly recognize that you think something is written poorly (so you can bail instead of wasting your time on it) and verifying facts regardless of who the author is supposed to be are better habits to cultivate.
I found this an interesting read (or skim):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
That's the link I would have suggested too. There are a few other attempts to list AI writing tells floating around but I don't have the links saved. The wikipedia article is probably the most comprehensive, though it's missing some important ones.
Really the best way to spot AI writing is to read enough of it that your language center learns to spot the patterns intuitively. Which in my experience happens pretty quickly, brains are amazing at pattern matching.
I feel like I'm definitely there when it comes to AI video and audio. Even if it's really convincing and I can't put my finger on exactly what's "off", I can still identify it as AI. But for some reason I feel this really intense fog around the written word. It's like my AI spider sense just doesn't work there. There have been quite a few instances where people have identified something as "really obvious AI" in comments and I had absolutely no idea.
LLMs supercharge so many issues with the internet at large so it's hard to have opinions on one specific part of it without being contradictory on the whole. So I'm going to be pedantically specific:
I think LLM writing is fine (or even fun) for entertainment and creative purposes, provided the models are fairly trained on works by consenting and compensated artists. Those models should be run on sustainable hardware, and in a well considered sandbox that protects the users privacy and with the proper guardrails and deterministic measures taken to prevent abuse and model drift.
And I need to be so granular with that view because things outside that parameters goes into territory I don't agree with and consider harmful.
I'm only going to rant on first part of that condition: "Entertainment and creative" reasons. It drives me insane that people use these tools for information, correspondance and decision making. Common sense would say that you should always verify whatever you find, especially regarding important matters. But it doesn't help that 9 out of 10 times, when any web page is published after 2024, its just more LLM generated content. Same thing with emails. I have a tag specifically for people that I know communicate via LLM. Because if I receive anything that contains technical or precise details; I will call to double check. If I send them something with important details; I will call to make sure they got the info in case their AI summary of their entire mailbox missed something. And the fact that these tools are becoming increasingly accurate is more of a problem because that means when the model does messes up, it's harder or less likely to be caught.
And even if they are more accurate than a human, the issue is a matter of accountability. My professional liability cover does not include AI related errors. I specifically asked for it over the last two years and they don't even entertain the idea. So I fave a report and an LLM filler line leads to a bad decision, that's on me. Hell, if I look up a formula online and get something slightly off from an LLM generated page, I'm still on the hook for that.
And that carries over into LLM written content thats flooding every corner of the internet. Especially when it's an LLM centipede as far as the eye can see. I looked up the recipe for a caramel sauce and AI auto-result spit out a method I knew was wrong. No butter, the sugar boils, too little cream no instruction to take it off the heat. It's going to burn or become a grainy fudge block. There was a reference to an LLM written recipe on a site created by a "home baker" in 2024. The site has several hundred recipes, each with a touching emotional story and photo that made the dishes look magical. It's obvious whats happening and there is no incentive to stop it. Especially when the metrics for online success is attention, scale and advertising space. Not authenticity and factuality. Yes it's been like that for a while, but it's near unmanageable.
It seems innocuous, but what if one of the millions of instantly generated, untested methods, suggest someone deep fry something frozen in hot oil. Or it misses a warning when some step could be dangerously reactive. Or a person has an important event and it's ruined because of bad guidance. It's not out of the question with how much content is generated in the food space alone. Multiply this issue across every field and every question. And then factor in that there is incentive to use these platforms in advertising. Include the fact that many LLM providers are very cozy with the current US president and their CEO's have, unique beliefs.
We make decisions based on perception of the world. LLM's have flattened that image into a general average and now its reinforcing itself ad nauseam. The tech is fine, I guess. My friend paid me to train his LLM game on some of my old TTRPG notes and the prototype I tested was fun for a few hours. I have a local model that has a good handle on the technical manuals and reference books I use and can point me towards things I might need. A guy I know has a model that is starting to preemptively flag issues on his print-farm. It's got utility, but it just seems like its the only tool being used for every possible thing, just to justify its existence.
I've been using LLMs at work for coding for a while but I've never used one for writing text that humans would read. I don't currently write enough to make that useful and I think my writing is strong enough that I never think it would improve it.
I guess that is arrogant lol but I have a reason for this belief:
A few years ago before LLMs were a thing, I had a need to communicate with various professionals, including school administrations and real estate agents. I would carefully craft the communications to make sure they were clear and accurate and used the proper formal language. More than once, I was accused of working with lawyers or other professionals on the communications. I think this means that a lot of adults never learned to write properly, or they just don't proofread what they've written before sending it. Maybe I should have been more sloppy because my writing style seems to have put the other people on guard.
I think it would be particularly difficult if I was in college at this time because I think a lot of my assignments would be flagged as AI.
Out of cutiosity: How would you define the term 'slop'? Does it encompas anything AI genrated or assisted, is there some qualitative metric to it, or where should the line be drawn?
As with most buzzy terminology, it's broad and abstract and everyone defines it a little differently.
Personally I'd define it as content that's hollow. Low signal to noise ratio, overuse of rhetorical tricks, overly confident assertions that sound definitive but fall apart under non-cursory examination, and so on.
But that's kind of abstract, it could also be defined as LLM generated content with insufficent human participation in the process.
Note that humans can create slop entirely without the help of AI but these days the majority seems to be AI generated. If you're lazy and uninvested in quality, there's no reason to make the content manually anymore
I think it's essentially become shorthand for anything generated wholly or in part by AI (regardless of perceived quality).
When I use the term slop, I mean any material that has annoyingly little substance relative to its length. Consuming slop feels like wandering in a maze with the expectation that behind the next turn you'll finally discover something of value, but all you discover is another turn, and then another, and so on, to oblivion, times a million. (The italic part of that sentence is sloppy because the same message could have been delivered using fewer words. I made you read redundant words, which feels bad and is just a tad abusive because I'm not being respectful of your time.)
Slop has always existed because some people have had enough incentive to create it manually even when it took them a lot of time and effort. However, LLMs make the process much, much faster which has resulted in an avalanche of slop content. This means that most slop we encounter now will be AI generated. However, being human created doesn't make slop content any better in any way.
(@AndreasChris)
I only use it for proofreading - it's no different to me than a spell checker when writing.
Yeah I don't find them that useful for writing beyond just proofreading and perhaps organizing my writing a bit better. I'm a bit of a rambler so I'll go off on related tangents very easily and my writing will often just end up as a bunch of vaguely related statements put together into one long paragraph. Since at my job we're encouraged to use AI for everything, I've had moments where I'll put my long rambling response to something into the AI and ask it to word things a bit better and more professionally. In the 5 months I've been doing this, I've yet to just directly take the AI output to respond to someone. I don't really know how to describe it but the writing just feels soulless. Usually with writing, I can usually understand the writer's intent and their thought process as I go through a piece from top to bottom. But with AI writing, it just feels like words on a screen. I don't really know how to articulate this better haha.
Souless is a great way to articulate it. I've often used the word hollow but I think I like that better. There's no substance at the core, even if the parts contain valid information
I agree with everything you said, except I find most LLM writing immediately apparent, and not strong. Even LLM writing disguised enough to not be apparent would be OKâŚmaybe not as good as authentic writing, but it must be semi-authentic because it must stand out from other LLM writing in its time.
Fortunately most of this writing is also apparent to automated tools (at least Pangram). So a tool that filters LLM posts and comments, if it doesnât already exist Iâm sure someone (maybe I) will make eventually. Iâm aware that almost certainly some LLM writing will pass the filter, but again, itâs a significant improvement if obvious writing is hidden.
Just as a heads-up, unfortunately (like @post_below demonstrated) it is fundamentally not possible for these tools to be accurate on a technical level, at least in the general case.
Either youâll let through a lot of LLM writing, or deny a lot of human writing, but when even the industry âfrontierâ OpenAI admits the authorship of a piece of text cannot be attributed to an LLM or a human in an automated manner, itâs not looking good.
There have been âwatermarkingâ, uh, attempts, where models were designed to favor certain phrasings on the individual word level, which is a pretty cool tech showcaseâŚ, but especially ever since the existence of somewhat capable open-weight models, the cat has been out of the bag â Google would have had to invent this method much earlier (and be confident enough to enable it by default with everything) for it to be relied upon by a majority of models, unfortunately.
Late addition, thereâs even more proof that it's not possible for, well, anyone to distinguish LLM from human writing anymore: I found this blog post about Fixing LLM writing with Distribution Fine Tuning, and, well⌠the technique seems to work alright. Here's a demo page, just click on one of the pre-made suggested prompts to the side and wait for the output to appear.
The author also posted a screenshot about this technique fooling Pangram, which is why I thought about commenting this here in the first place as that was the tool @indirection had brought up in the first place.
The method is really interesting, solve the problem of fine tuning introducing LLMisms by running an extra step to move it back in the direction of the original distribution. It makes a lot of sense. There are downsides though.
I tried out the demo, asked it to write a blog post about LLMs because it seemed fitting. And you're right, if I'd come across the result in the wild I wouldn't have pegged the output as AI generated. However I wouldn't have read it either. It's written at a very low grade level and it makes false claims. It's considerably less accurate than modern LLMs. It accomplishes the goal of being hard to detect by making the hallucinations sound like ignorance and the rhetorical tells look like poor writing instead of AI giveaways.
At some point (maybe even soonish) LLM prose may indeed be impossible to tell apart from human prose, but at least for right now the majority of it is still pretty obvious.
Most of it seems really obvious to me too, but I think there's a salience point where that happens. I know my first few interactions with (modern, say mid to late 2025) LLM writing I thought it was much better than it actually is.
I'll take your word the Pangram catches all the obvious slop, I've only used it a few times with somewhat mixed results. It does seem to be better than other detectors out there. But for example, I just prompted 3 paragraphs of slop using guidelines to avoid certain AI tells and Pangram scored it "100% human". To be fair though, in addition to avoiding tells, I also gave it a lot of grounded facts to work with so it didn't need to pad or inflate. And I suppose you're right, that's way more useful than most of the current AI blog posts, which have 2 or 3 facts and a lot of puffery and confabulation.
LLMs are great at that verbose rhetoric, like a teenager or college student using fillet to meet an essay word count. If you use one in the writing process, you have to be ruthless about cutting fluff. If you gather new info or quotes, you have to verify that the phrase the LLM uses is what was actually said (and by the person it's attributed to).
I treat AI output like an early draft, fixing structure, repetition, wordiness. But sometimes it's like arranging dead flowers, and I have to take the general concept and rewrite from scratch anyway.