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Slop Cop

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Re: Slop Cop

#81

Post by mech422 »

UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote: post #70
jollyllama wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The problem is not X. It's Y. Your writing style, if not your thoughts, have already been infected by LLM prose.

Anyone over the age of 25 actually developed their writing style before ChatGPT came about. Getting all uppity about these surface-level LLM ‘tropes’ is just stupid. 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’m sure that there’s a correlation. Take the “ew, em-dash” stuff back to Twitter.

Yeah - writing styles have really changed over the years. Last time I ran a business document thru Grammarly, I was told it wasn't written at a 6(8?) grade level and was too complex :-P

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...

Re: Slop Cop

#82

Post by abustamam »

Aurornis wrote: post #80
Swizec wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

> Always judge an author by the length of their text. 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…

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.

Re: Slop Cop

#83

Post by abustamam »

lokar wrote: post #48
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.

For better or for worse my team has standardized on using Miro for technical designs and diagrams. It's a lot easier to visualize the system in a diagram than it is to talk about it in prose.

I think it's important to choose the right medium for communication though. Some things just need to be written out concisely.

Re: Slop Cop

#84

Post by abustamam »

flexagoon wrote: post #68
slopinthebag wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

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.

The concept of word count in high school was bonkers. Knowing my teacher wouldn't check, I wrote a dense line with a lot of words, using small print and small words, and then used that as my baseline (so let's say it had 20 words). Then if I needed 200 words total I'd write ten lines, knowing full well that other lines of text would only have 10-15 words.

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.

Re: Slop Cop

#86

Post by dingaling »

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…

> According to this recommendation, writing should never have any emphasis...

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.

Re: Slop Cop

#87

Post by ar_turnbull »

SkiFreeWin3 wrote: post #43

[dead]

Interesting. I made a skill for my Claude agent based on Wikipedia’s list of AI writing tells. /remove-ai-writing

It works reasonably well (better if you run it a few times), but still benefits from a final pass by a human editor IMO.

https://github.com/arturnbull/remove-ai-writing

Re: Slop Cop

#88

Post by NitpickLawyer »

I c/p a section of Asimov's "The Last Question", since it was readily on the front page. It detected 14 patterns (2 reds, one yellow, bunch of green and blue) in 583 words. Welp, I guess it's back to school for mr. Asimov...

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...

Re: Slop Cop

#89

Post by NitpickLawyer »

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.

Haha! Did the same with Asimov. These "detectors" are a joke.

Re: Slop Cop

#90

Post by danilocesar »

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've heard this theory in the past:

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.

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