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Slop Cop

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Re: Slop Cop

#41

Post by littlexsparkee »

Swizec wrote: post #31
chromacity wrote: post #22

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…

> "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 fewer of them? 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 tal…

So many books that could've been an article. I try to save myself time by checking Goodreads but it's not always clear as I'm more critical than the average person. Reading a preview in Google Books helps but you only get so many pages before you're cut off. Appreciate that lately new books are sometimes featured in pubs with an excerpt.

Re: Slop Cop

#42

Post by layer8 »

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.

A lot of these things were well-known clichés already before LLMs, used by people who wanted to sound sophisticated but weren't articulate or didn't have anything to say. That's why LLMs sound like that.

Re: Slop Cop

#44

Post by jedbrooke »

SkiFreeWin3 wrote: post #43

[dead]

Honestly, I get pretty good improvement from just adding a “Emoji are forbidden” and a small list of banned words and phrases (the usual suspects like “it’s not just x, it’s y” etc)

Re: Slop Cop

#45

Post by lemagedurage »

krackers wrote: post #38
Mistletoe wrote: post #33

>Staccato Burst. Now I have a name for the thing I despise the most about AI writing.

Isn't this called the tricolon? Ironically the names of the patterns all seem AI generated.

It looks like tricolon is about specifically three parallel elements, while staccato is about short consecutive sentences, so staccato would be the appropriate name here.

Re: Slop Cop

#46

Post by Chaosvex »

korse wrote: post #8

The feedback needs to go away or this thing is just exacerbating the problem. Give a slop score if you must but then shut up and let the user interpret the result as they see fit. 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 s…

Agreed. I ran some human-authored technical articles through this and most (all?) of the suggestions were just stripping the personality out of the writing. Kind of ironic.

Re: Slop Cop

#47

Post by lotyrin »

iamjs wrote: post #30

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

It's not purporting to be an LLM detector. Your 2000s era posts probably do have some sloppy cliches in them.

Re: Slop Cop

#48

Post by lokar »

chromacity wrote: post #22

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 a senior engineer I spend a lot of time reviewing and approving technical designs, PRDs etc.

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.

Re: Slop Cop

#49

Post by slopinthebag »

chromacity wrote: post #22

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…

> Many students are rewarded for using flowery language in school essays

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!)

Re: Slop Cop

#50

Post by [deleted] »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #39

Wow! Did you know that Abraham Lincoln let AI write the Gettysburg Address? 17 patterns identified out of only 305 words. I don't know why I ever let him get the ad revenue.

[deleted]
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