Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Slop Cop

awnist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 169 posts

Re: Slop Cop

#21

Post by nz »

awnist wrote: post #17
kstrauser wrote: post #15

LOL. I copied and pasted an 87-word blog post I wrote yesterday, on my phone, via my own thumbs. It detected 4 likely AI patterns, or once every 22 words. 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…

It isn’t an AI detector. It flags valid language patterns that have become LLM-output clichés through overuse. False positives are a given. and I'll never give up on em dashes

I've taken to telling people, that if they see me write a long piece, that lacks em-dashes, then they should assume that I am under duress, and send help.

Re: Slop Cop

#22

Post by chromacity »

Like 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 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.

Re: Slop Cop

#24

Post by aesthesia »

tavavex wrote: post #19

This 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…

I think this would come off a lot better if the recommendations weren't so absolute. I like the effect of a multicolored slab of highlights calling out every LLM cliche in a passage. Yes, the slop style is not just the sum of these individual patterns, but they're definitely significant contributors to the effect, and they're worth being aware of in your own writing regardless of their association with LLMs. You just can't treat it as a list of must-resolve errors (same as with any writing feedback, really).

Re: Slop Cop

#25

Post by rdmuser »

I've been wanting something like this for a while now but as an extension that runs locally. Just something I can click to get a quick response telling me if the article seems like ai so I can focus on the writing without needing to spend energy on remembering ai styles and detecting obvious ai. I'd be pretty happy to see something like that built straight into firefox.

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.

Re: Slop Cop

#26

Post by furyofantares »

Removing the aesthetic tells from LLM-generated text won't fix the fact that there's nobody home with opinions and experiences to express. It will just make it take more work for your unsuspecting audience to figure that out.

Re: Slop Cop

#27

Post by justzisguyuknow »

ameliaquining wrote: post #9

It seems relevant that a lot of these things were fairly notorious clichés even before LLMs, which just intensified the phenomenon. They were what people tended to do who wanted to sound smart and sophisticated but didn't have a developed voice or anything in particular to say. Indeed, I'm fairly sure this is why LLMs sound like this.

Indeed,

Re: Slop Cop

#28

Post by [deleted] »

awnist wrote: post #17
kstrauser wrote: post #15

LOL. I copied and pasted an 87-word blog post I wrote yesterday, on my phone, via my own thumbs. It detected 4 likely AI patterns, or once every 22 words. 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…

It isn’t an AI detector. It flags valid language patterns that have become LLM-output clichés through overuse. False positives are a given. and I'll never give up on em dashes

[deleted]

Re: Slop Cop

#30

Post by iamjs »

I'm enjoying pasting early 2000's era blog posts in here and learning that they too were LLM slop!
Post reply on HN