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Comment by sssilver | Hacker News Reader

> What stayed with me was not the swimming. It was that none of it looked planned. She was not spending her afternoon at the lake, she was just going through her day, and the lake happened to be part of it.

Fascinating phenomenon, but this sentence caused me to stop reading and close the tab.

"Slop", I thought.

Now I think about it, I'm not even sure I can put my finger on what about that sentence came across as AI slop.

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Hmm, you might be right about that paragraph. I am very sensitive to LLM smells, but I missed this one, probably because the rest of the essay seems handwritten.

Of course, one can never be sure. Many writers are picking up on this style, too, so it could have organic origins.

Of course it has organic origins: where else could the LLM have learned it?

It's the "it's not X. It's Y" pattern isn't it?

Although the verb "stayed with me" seems a little sloppy to me too.

I feel like this is one of the most damaging parts of the slop problem. Occasionally the slopisms fit into real writing. Sometimes people do just write like this, and we are losing a sense of reality because we keep being tripped up by this nagging little voice

I frowned over the "none of it looked planned" - the whole description sounds as if that swim was exactly that: planned from the beginning.

She was not doing x, she was doing y, and surprising insight z.

It’s borderline, could just as well be just human text.

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