Slop Cop
awnist.com
awnist.com
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 far fewer of them?
On the flip side, if you're a human and actually have something of consequence to say, "delve" all you want.
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.
Flashbacks to a past employer where the CEO decided that brevity was a core company value and started rewarding people for short communications and scolding us for longer text.
Over the next year a few charlatans moved up the ranks by spitting out half-baked thoughts and e-mails all the time, which looked like clarity and brevity on the surface. People were afraid to speak out or discuss nuance because it was too many words, and you didn't want to use too many words.
Also, any metric ceases to be a good metric the moment it becomes a goal.
I have observed both of the above statements in many different contexts, they seem to be (somewhat) universal rules for human society.
That's when someone breaks down their point into multiple separate messages, one sentence at a time, when a single coherent paragraph or two would have worked. Why send one message when you can send 7 in rapid succession?
It's arguably the most annoying method of communication because it spams your notifications and you have no idea when someone has finished dumping.
I can quickly imagine several situations in which one might speak to a public facing individual but still like to say "I was told by {sales rep} that {statement} was the case" or "{Employee} in support assured me this would be resolved in {timeperiod}" or "I had an excellent conversation with {employee} and want to ensure they'll be getting any commission due to them because they really convinced me more than your website"
From: "John Doe" <support@domain.com>My mother was British. She was also an awesome cook.
She used to say that the British dining table was the fanciest in the world, with fine china plates, silver silverware, lace tablecloths and matching napkins, etc., but terrible food.
French tables, on the other hand, were casual affairs, with newspaper on the table, and a candle jammed into a wine bottle, but excellent food.
For hundreds of years there have been incentives (money) to publish books, and yet in 2026 we still haven’t worked out how to monetarily incentivise authors of single articles without bundling them with articles or other authors you wouldn’t read (because you only care about a single article damnit
It was something that I guess I logically knew but hadn't fully realized. I had always tried to be fancy with my writing and pad it out to meet minimum word counts, with "understand-ability" being somewhat of an afterthought. Just that one statement in my ACT prep book made me, in my opinion, a significantly better writer.
The result? Increasingly homogeneous, boring text.
I consider more than three paragraphs and more than two sentences per paragraph a "writing smell." It's relatively easy now, especially when I realized my predilection for verbosity was actually a symptom of my own insecurity, emotionalism, and indecisiveness.
I try to limit my emails to one, clear, strong point—usually just factual statements—in the active voice, eschewing adverbs as much as possible. The emails almost write themselves now, because there isn't much choice on what to write anymore.
Ok, Mr. Milchick.
In a couple of years, the corporative communication will work like this:
You write a bunch of bullet points and feed them to an AI to create a beautiful and well written email. Your reader will feed that email into his own AI and he will generate bullet points to read.
Not 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!)
Cheating? Maybe. But it's a silly metric to begin with, and obviously the teacher didn't actually care about the count because I got an A in most of my essays.
As a non-native speaker, I learned so much more by just watching YouTube in English than in middle and high school English classes combined
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.
I think it's important to choose the right medium for communication though. Some things just need to be written out concisely.
Comes in handy when describing a state machine or the flow of data.
While it's important for universities to continue to teach the ability to write using 'flowery' language I think that it is also important that schools teach students something like BLUF -- Bottom Line Upfront.[0]
Compare and contrast those two sentences. I'm fine writing a comment that us just the first sentence and the link without a footnote but I know as a message it won't go over well on a site like Hackernews. They looooooove their verbosity here.
So in some situations you have to gussy it up -- give it some of that Emeril "BAM". The deal is that you have to know your audience. The medium is the message.[1] shit like that.
Stuff on Linkedin is full of pointless words because that's what Linkedin is for -- it's about signalling to other people that you can string together a bunch of pointless words that are effusive and vaguely passive aggressive at the same time -- you know, typical business shit.
“Whether in a suit or in a loincloth people are ignorant little thorns cutting into one another. They seem incapable of advancing beyond the violent tendencies which at one time were necessary for survival.”
We can delve into this kinda stuff but really it just comes back to the know your audience and that the medium is the message. Also don't repeat your self.
Definitely don't repeat yourself.
Your writing style, if not your thoughts, have already been infected by LLM prose.
Edit: I would add that you literally followed the formula in every respect except for a single word, and IMO LLMs are already changing to avoid the single-word formulation.
When I first started out, I was taught you use passive voice in proposals (eg 'a program will be written..' not 'I will write a program...') since you didn't know who was actually going to write it. I can't imagine how that would go over now...
Just because two guys got together a hundred years ago and wrote some stuff doesn't mean it's worth dedicating a life of writing to.
Let alone decades of arguments supporting the claim that their style guide is at best only useful for a small subset of writing, the two themselves admit that there can be no one universal styling guide in a variety of ways. You can see many examples in the text itself in which the authors seem to forget their own advice.
Consider:
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell.
Which could communicated much more succinctly containing exactly the same information without any extra exposition:
Vigor is concision. A piece should contain nothing unnecessary, just as a drawing has no unnecessary lines [needless repetition](and a machine no unnecessary parts). This requires not that all sentences short be short, but that every word tell.
Or even more succinctly with only the actual message:
Vigorous writing is concise. Concise writing is vigorous (If you're willing to be charitable enough to provide a second example)
That this does not require unnecessary brevity is easily inferred given that the word is "concise" meaning "free from all elaboration and superfluous detail." not "brief" meaning "short". That the writer should follow the advice is made plain by it being presented in a book of advice. The first two sentences alone (if you grant that the second sentence is necessary) contain four repetitions of the same information. If "vigorous writing is concise" then why have we said the same thing five times?
It is an error to apply those style guides blindly to mismatched contexts. Other than as an exercize in following a style guide, it is not great to teach students that they should always write in a journalistic style, because it is simply untrue. There is nothing wrong with writing "A program will be written" when it is unknown who will write a program, and it is an error to avoid the passive voice by adding incorrect details.
> I am thankfully yet to run into a situation where someone with this attitude is actually in a position to be able to negatively affect my life
I don't get it, you're so attached to certain cliches that to attack them in person would somehow be a detriment to you?
> I’m sure that there’s a correlation.
What are you implying?
The LLM tic, by contrast, has a noticeable tendency to be deployed even when X has never been previously mentioned. It is a valid rhetorical technique, and I assume that's why the LLMs have picked up on it - but it has to be deployed judiciously. Which is something LLMs appear absolutely incapable of doing. And that is why people notice it, and think it sucks.
The way the OP used the 'not X, but Y' pattern, the 'X' and 'Y' are two clear, specific, and (most importantly) distinct things, as opposed to stereotypical LLM usage where they're vague characterizations or metaphors. And there's a reason to emphasize that it's not X, because the Slop Cop website implicitly suggests that it is X.
Those can still be things that I want to read but the AI rhetorical style is so tedious and overused at this point it's really annoying to read them. So this tool would help with those cases. (Assuming people actually use it.)
I've had 5 or 6 times where I've thought, OK, finally someone has produced something useful this way. And in the end I've always been bitten, by hallucinations or by an inability to work out what the author cared about or was trying to express.
Again, I believe you've had ones where you did want to read it, I'm not trying to contradict that. I'm still waiting though, and until then I'd really prefer the aesthetic tells to still be obvious.
https://netviper.gr/blog/kaio-v020/
Assuming they're not outright lying this looks interesting, but I can't get past the slop in that blog post.
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.
And looking at its suggestions, they are not very good. People are better developing their own writing style than trusting generic advice meant for common-denominator writing.
like llms are using our language here so there's gonna be patterns we use that they also use.
i dont think we're ever going to get to a place where we have a "yes/no this was written by AI" kind of tool. i do be worrying what this might do to the fabric of society but there's no puttin this damn cat back in the bag so i guess we'll find out
And nobody is really saying that you need to completely eliminate these constructs. 17 matches out of 305 words is an order of magnitude less than the example it opens with.
(For stories with multiple protagonists, the common choices that seem to work best for readers are 3 or 5. Humans are weird.)
I suspect that LLMs use that rule so much, because it's so common in their training data, for good reasons.
Seems like a sad situation, but I'm not going to start changing my communication style to avoid sounding like an LLM. At least not yet.
Update: 13 patterns in 800 words for Samuel Clemens. Apparently he's an em-dash abuser, but also likes "filler adverbs", "triple constructions" and "anaphora abuse". Damn!
And for Mr. Hemingway we have 43 patterns in 1600 words. 16 filler adverbs, 5 triple constructions, 5 staccato bursts, and 14 question then answer. My my...
Inputting Japanese sentences of any length flags the whole sentence as "Dramatic Fragment: A standalone paragraph with ≤4 words".
Which brings up an interesting point - what do these LLM clichés look like in Japanese?
Besides text reading like a machine translation, the tell-tale signs often involve things like:
- itemized lists (I know, it's ironic that I'm using them here)
- frequent use of conjunctions
- use of demonstratives that feels redundant
- full-width colons, especially in titles
- subheadings that always end in abstract nouns
- bold text, especially at the beginning of a line
The demonstrative bit may be hard to express, but to give you an idea: when communicating in Japanese, words that can be understood from context may be omitted. Explicitly writing out words understood from context can sometimes make a sentence sound redundant.
Before LLMs were widespread, SEO spam in the Japanese net tended to be affiliate sites with predictable, template paragraphs. I get reminded of those sites whenever GPT starts a response with 「結論から言うと、〇〇」, since that's exactly how those affiliate sites wrote back in the day.
Otherwise, almost nothing. I don't know if it's because it's specialized on English or if learning it as a second language makes it really unnatural?
I just write my text without too much thought about it and I get a rewritten version that is usually clearer, but not pedantic or overly verbose.
It particular helps for English text as it is not my first language
And good to know that Teddy Roosevelt was not an LLM: https://www.trcp.org/2011/01/18/it-is-not-the-critic-who-cou...
Always gotta have In This AI Era of Ours. Because even if you fail to convince the reader of the point you ostensibly were trying to make you still get to tediously skull-bang about The AI Era. And it only costs tokens.
> Staccato Burst Three or more consecutive very short sentences at matching cadence.
This is real. It’s not your imagination. AI is here and eating your lunch/AI is psychologically draining/The unemployment lines are unusually long.
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.
We are moving to a point in time, where we don't care if the PR was written by AI. We care that the author understand what is about, that it tested it and in general, we want the ownership.
With articles is the same. I don't care if it was written by AI, if the content is interesting, and ai make it easier to digest... That's a win win.
The problem is not the presentation. Is the content.
The prompt is normally larger than the content generated.
Paste AI generated text and get a more human sounding version? That’s just AI generated text with extra steps.
Also, it was painful to learn that my very first blog post I wrote in 2013 is AI generated. But I'm fine with it because I read this:
> A short punchy opener (≤10 words) followed by two or more substantially longer elaboration sentences — the LLM "hook then evidence pile" rhythm.
... and realized that the entire app is AI generated.
It's actually starting to generate interesting content based on me giving it a few bullets and ideas. I won't claim it's perfect but it does a decent enough job.
I have my reasons for doing this (we help people set up agentic work flows) and I appreciate that not everybody likes the idea of AI generated content. But I think it will start getting harder and harder to spot AI slop. Basically slop is what you get without guard rails and quality gates. Of course, most people still lack the skills to configure their AI tools properly. Particularly non technical people. But it's not that hard and I bet there are a few handy journalists out there getting better at this. Also, for technical writers this is not going to be optional.
I read this before but I have some doubts. I recall some companies that were surprised when suddenly the prices were increased. Usual examples include Amazon, Google and some more, but this can happen to any company, including AI slop master companies. I am not at all claiming that the AI slop has zero use cases, of course - there are use cases, so I don't deny that. But the assumption generated here by AI slop, claiming how all the problems will soon have been solved, and risk-free profits are to be made by all companies, is just rubbish nonsense. AI slop is a big liar. In fact: I am beginning to believe that the current US administration is an AI slop brigade. Every time the stock market yields some suspicious profits, it seems to be that the AI slop protects some thieves here.
Yes, I see the message about it staying local. No, I don't trust the message or that you will never be hacked.
Every single article out there is now structured as: - THE problem - THE solution - THE proof - Why it matters
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.
Until now, ideas were only relevant when the owner was able to communicate then regardless of the impact of the idea.
LLM "democratize"(VC term) sharing ideas, as people with low communication skills can be heard.
LLM helps me communicate my ideas better.
Thinking in different angles, focus on the main idea, structure in a post series... It constantly challenge my mess.
Opus and I, iterate over 20 times a single blog post.
It should loop the LLM’s results back on itself repeatedly, behind the scenes, until its writing is free of signs of slop. After your quality gates pass and the result is presented, it’d be cool to then see a visualization of each of the agent’s drafts that the user can page through to watch how the writing was gradually incrementally improved by the model!
No need to keep a human in the writing-improvement loop. Just show it when it’s slop free.
It might spit back the same thing the first round. But after the first time it received the exact same feedback for saying the same thing, the model will realize it’s in a deterministic sandbox and try something different. You need to give it all of the conversation including its past attempts as context. If it tries the exact same wording that’s okay, it’s just one more invisible round of back-and-forth. The model is going to rediscover how to work with the harness every time, but that’s not your users’ problem because you’ve hidden that wrinkly bit behind the automation - they just see “model did 10 drafts and here’s the result - would you like to view the result or page through the drafts?”
What I am describing is exactly what a human would do, it is just automated and thus, getting to a good result becomes insanely faster.
Thought this was a NY Post-style headline about FBI "top cop" Kash Patel's drinking problem: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/04/kash-patel-fbi-...
> 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.
If you have measurable amplifications, use them. "This outcome was 40% more frequent". Otherwise keep subjective emotion out of documents, unless you're writing a novel.
> God forbid you organize an essay that's in any way non-linear...
Essays should be brutally logical and sequential. If the text is becoming cluttered with data, break it out into a table. I read a document for information, not for some movie-director suspenseful build-up and revelation.
There's a good rule where I work that any document that requires someone to make a decision must fit on two or fewer pages. Anything longer is TLDR. Tables and charts are prized for their information density, novelesque writing is not.
There's more types of writing between the extremes of research papers and novels. Data is useful and all, but asking it to be the sole driving component of ALL types of non-fictional writing is too much. Besides, this tool would criticize your novel just the same, because the intended use is to have it filter everything you write.
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.
I had a suspicion that a friend was using AI to respond to my texts///and this said he was!!!
It caught a "Short-Hook Paragraph" and "Negation Pivot" and "Staccato Burst" in one text.
Wonderful tool!
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.
and I'll never give up on em dashes
Now I have a name for the thing I despise the most about AI writing.
This doesn't detect AI slop. It's just a grammarly/copilot clone.