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Comment by jacob019 | Hacker News Reader

I've been seeing AI slop being used as ad-hominem. If I'm writing a couple paragraphs, I'll often run it through a model and ask it to make minimal edits for spelling and grammar. It makes it more readable and saves me time editing. If someone doesn't like my thoughts and they see an em dash, they can call it AI slop instead of responding, which is really annoying because the model otherwise does a good job of editing. In some cases I've been accused of AI slop for original unedited content.

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Some of us are older—and use en dash all the time.

I’ve stopped using em and en dashes for this specific reason.

To hell with that. It will be a bad day when someone accuses me of using AI to forge original work—a bad day for them, not for me.

I just use commas or semi-colons where I would have previously used em dashes. It's annoying to have to adapt to avoid triggering people's faulty AI slop pattern matching, but the alternatives are perfectly fine.

I actually associate it with a younger writer, perhaps it skipped a generation. I can imagine that someone who grew up in a world where typing an em dash meant looking up an alt code would develop a style that avoids them—but it's only a long press of the - away on the device where I do most of my writing by volume so of course I'm going to use them.

Back when the English Internet was Latin-1, one

    would often see expedients like
    this -- or this--or even, most
    minimally, just this-

which held over well enough that I believe Word by default probably still replaces one of them if you use it.

My iPhone changes -- to —

I fell in love with them a long time ago when reading Nietzsche aphorisms.

Some of us even know where to find them on the iOS—and the Android—keyboard.

And some of us are the sort of nerds¹ who use Unicode numeric superscript characters for footnotes.

¹ An unstylish or socially awkward person generally devoted to intellectual, academic, or technical pursuits or interests.

"AI slop" is following the same path as "Dunning-Kruger effect," "enshittification," and so many other terms. Someone introduces a term that's useful to describe an actual phenomenon, it rapidly spreads to dominate the discourse because it's topical and punchy, and pretty soon using it is such a strong signal of being one of the "cool people who hates all the correct bad stuff" that people use it to describe stuff they merely don't like or disagree with. Once everyone's using it, it becomes useless for both its original descriptive purpose and as a social signal, so all the trendy discourse addicts move onto the next linguistic innovation and you only see random people on Facebook or Reddit who are behind the times using it, usually inaccurately as they're just following the misuse they learned it from.

It's particularly scary watching "AI slop" follow that path because of the extreme moral polarization associated with using LLMs or generative art. There's people who will see some casual mention of a game or film or app or something "using AI" on social media without evidence and immediately blast off into a witch hunt to make sure the whole world knows that whoever involved with that thing are Bad People who need to be shunned and punished. It has almost immediately become the go-to way to slam someone online because it carries such strong implications, requires little/no evidence, and is almost impossible to fully refute. Think there's a lot to learn from observing this, and it does not bode well for the next few years of discourse.

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