Looking forward to putting every apology statement into this - although many of them tend to require OCR for being posted as images or screenshots.
Slop Cop
151–160 of 169 posts
Re: Slop Cop
#152Like the original Grammarly, I think this can be useful for business writing because these tools 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…
"Can you condense that down further without loosing clarity? " goes into every prompt.
I can condense that and improve clarity simply by s/oo/o/
Re: Slop Cop
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tangential but it kinda irks me when people just put their initials when signing off on an email. It seems like unnecessary brevity in a world where you can type your name once in your emails signature line and never worry about typing it again.
How about not writing the name at all? It's already in the email header.
Eh, I'm ambivalent. Letters in the mail have a From and people still sign them and some people even date them even if there's a post mark. At this point though it's more work for me to remove my signature. Plus my signature has my phone number.
Re: Slop Cop
#154How does this site tokenize text? Split on ASCII whitespace? Inputting Japanese sentences of any length flags the whole sentence as "Dramatic Fragment: A standalone paragraph with ≤4 words".
That's right, its tokenization and fragment rules use fairly simple heuristics that assume whitespace delimited words plus English language/punctuation. Proper CJK support would require language specific tokenization and morphological parsing. Correcting rules like "≤4 words = dramatic fragment" would be difficult. The more complex rules already require LLM roundtrips, so supporting all languages in one pass would ne…
> 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.
Re: Slop Cop
#155This is so dumb. LLMs have some patterns they copied from people, so now people need to stop using those patterns? Not to mention 10000000 famous books, stories, speeches, essays, comments and more are flagged by these stupid tools. These kinds of tools only narrow the scope of our expression and over time can suffocate the entire written language into a single flavour of corporate approved not-slop speak. Yes AI wri…
Corporate speak sounds like AI and vise versa though I don't think this concern makes sense.
Re: Slop Cop
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is such a thing as balance. For some reason it tends to be very easy to go overboard in either direction. 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.
I've also observed the third direction, which is the message storm. 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…
I think that is in line with what I said: a balance is best. I have seen the opposite of what you described: long messages with no paragraph breaks. Not great either.
Re: Slop Cop
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
In uni, maybe. But my experience in middle/high school was that hitting the minimum word count was much more important than actually good writing.
Yes - US high school instruction in writing is something I have to spend weeks un-teaching in first year and majors courses.
I'm not in the US, I guess English classes are just like that around the world.
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
Re: Slop Cop
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is something I've been working on in my own professional writing for years. I used to write very long emails, thinking I was providing insight and detail, but nobody would even bother reading them because it was such a chore. 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 act…
> I realized my predilection for verbosity was actually a symptom of my own insecurity, emotionalism, and indecisiveness. Ok, Mr. Milchick.
Milchik's problem was that he worshipped--quite literally--the company. I do this for my own gain. I started getting much more of what I wanted out of work and other formal relationships (my kids' teachers, my doctors, etc) when I got honest with how I was communicating and how I was being perceived and changed my habits to suit.
Re: Slop Cop
#159I pasted a blog that I wrote myself and flagged hundreds of patterns. Granted, the article is 15,000 words so some are expected but there are simply too many false positives to make this and any similar tool have any usefulness beyond flagging the most obvious offenders. And looking at its suggestions, they are not very good. People are better developing their own writing style than trusting generic advice meant for…
I did the same thing, and also found the results pretty mediocre. At best it did point out some places I could've dropped a less important word to be more concise, but pretty much any editing will do that (and I do think I tend towards verbosity as a writer; it's a flaw, but it's my organic flaw). Beyond that it was just pattern-matching on sentence structures it thinks are over-used in LLM-generated prose. Even if t…
yup same just tried it myself which an email I wrote.
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
Re: Slop Cop
#160This 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 a…
Yeah, "don't overuse these patterns" is the right attitude for tools like this, not "fix all mistakes". And that's OK?
It would be OK, but the point I'm raising is that the Grammarly-like design encourages the user to resolve everything it highlights, to make the text look uniform and spotless.