Slop Cop

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.

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.

I 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 common-denominator writing.

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.

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.

How 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".

I love how you can tell something was generated because it comes out clear and using many of the important writing fundamentals we were all taught.

Project doing something similar: http://slopwash.com

Cleans up content. Less about critiquing and giving feedback, more just “give me the better output”

This is a genuinely useful tool with a shitty self-sabotaging name.

I'm curious how well this thing works, but you need a yardstick to measure it against. The last year or two a burgeoning community of meatspace AI detectors has emerged right here on HN, it might be fun for someone to rank "sloppiness" of submitted HN articles as gauged by comment sentiment vs. this tool to see how well they align.

One thing I learned is that AI written text is not hard to spot. Usually, when I meet slop, I close it one or two paragraphs in. Although tools like this will become more common, they usually serve to win an argument, or confirm what you already believe.

Also, it was painful to learn that my very first blog post I wrote in 2013 is AI generated. But I'm fine with it because I read this:

> A short punchy opener (≤10 words) followed by two or more substantially longer elaboration sentences — the LLM "hook then evidence pile" rhythm.

... and realized that the entire app is AI generated.

Being cautious and an autistic mathematician also I am prone to heavy qualification. This causes very large blocks of my writing to be highlighted as "Hedge Stack" which isn't really helpful. Lots of Overused Intensifier and Triple Construction instances also, but those are usually words or phrases, not several paragraphs together as with Hedge Stack.

Seems like a sad situation, but I'm not going to start changing my communication style to avoid sounding like an LLM. At least not yet.

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.

I find it funny that all of these little tools lean into the slop = poop dynamic.

I'm building writetrack.dev - a writing signal sdk that helps folks understand proof of process. It takes a different approach to writing analysis and I'm pretty sure the logo will never feature a brown turd.

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

gptzero.me is an excellent LLM-authored text detector.

I'm sure there are some useful applications of this but we can't trust the reliability of an AI detector for the same reasons we can't trust the reliability of AI.

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 annoying nitpicks. Let's take a look at a few.

> Overused Intensifier - Delete it. If the sentence still makes sense, the word was never needed. If it doesn't, rewrite the sentence to show why it matters.

You heard it here first. Adjectives? More like AIdjectives, a covert plan by AI companies to make our writing more sloppy. According to this recommendation, writing should never have any emphasis, it should only contain the most basic "X is Y" relations, like in some programming language. Sentences should contain the bare minimum amount of information required to parse them, everything else must be cut. In practice, this recommendation only filters a few of the most pervasive 'corporate PowerPoint'-style language, but even then, the suggestion that these words are never useful is wrong.

> Triple Construction - Break the pattern. Use two items or four. Or convert one item into its own sentence to give it more weight.

Humans may really like when things are structured into threes, but you must resist this AI temptation! Use two or four points, because you're not like them. The only reason cited for why this is wrong is that LLMs use this pattern often, so naturally the rest of us must cede good writing practices to them.

> "Almost" Hedge - Commit. "Almost always" → "usually." Or just say "always" and defend the claim. Readers notice when you won't take a stance.

As we all know, the world is discrete and easy to describe. That's why there simply isn't anything between things that happen "usually" (70%) and "always" (100%). Saying "almost always" (95%) is bad, because you should round your estimates and defend what is now an obviously wrong statement, for it makes you seem more brutal and confident.

> "Broader Implications" - State the implication explicitly, or cut the phrase. "This has broader implications" says nothing. What are the implications? Say them.

God forbid you organize an essay that's in any way non-linear, temporarily withholding some information for the sake of organization. Asking to can the phrase entirely says that even complex writing should be strung together in a rigid and sequential order.

That's the problem with the project, the way I see it. It was too heavily inspired by Grammarly and the likes, and in chasing it, the criticisms were adapted to fit the Grammarly model. The issue with that LLM 'style' is the punchy, continuous overuse of these patterns to the point where these phrases start seeming like meaningless sound combinations. There's nothing wrong with most of these patterns individually, what I hate is when text is filled with them to the brim, not when they show at all. If your writing is like the example paragraph, with most of the text highlighted, then it's a sign that your essay is more rhetoric than substance. But if you write an argument with three items in it and it's highlighted because "that's like AI" to make you delete it, then that's performative self-censorship, not improving your writing.

The LLM Prose Tells and wiki page linked in the readme was a fun read. https://github.com/awnist/slop-cop?tab=readme-ov-file#source...

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 steps toward some universal standard. Having one is fine, in theory, but the beauty lies in how we solve for our inability to consistently utilize it. Adding mechanism to every step removes the beauty. Stop being the problem.

> "In an Era of…" Opening phrase that stalls before reaching the actual argument.

Always gotta have In This AI Era of Ours. Because even if you fail to convince the reader of the point you ostensibly were trying to make you still get to tediously skull-bang about The AI Era. And it only costs tokens.

> Staccato Burst Three or more consecutive very short sentences at matching cadence.

This is real. It’s not your imagination. AI is here and eating your lunch/AI is psychologically draining/The unemployment lines are unusually long.

>Staccato Burst.

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

I don't understand the point of this. Terse writing isn't always necessarily better or something that LLMs are incapable of.

This doesn't detect AI slop. It's just a grammarly/copilot clone.

If prompted appropriately, LLMs can write prose that mirrors nearly any style you ask for. Not sure what the big hubbub about "slop" is. Honestly it's annoying.

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 out the "proof" that it's machine generated.

You want me to enter my api key into a website?

Yes, I see the message about it staying local. No, I don't trust the message or that you will never be hacked.