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.
Tangential, but I remember when I was studying for the ACT, there was something in one of the practice books that stuck with me. I'm paraphrasing but it was something like "Good writing is clear and easy to understand. It's about communication, make sure you communicate".
It was something that I guess I logically knew but hadn't fully realized. I had always tried to be fancy with my writing and pad it out to meet minimum word counts, with "understand-ability" being somewhat of an afterthought. Just that one statement in my ACT prep book made me, in my opinion, a significantly better writer.
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.
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.
> 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!)
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.
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.
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.
The interesting thing is that LLMs sound kind of like LinkedIn Growth Hackers even if you don't explicitly tell them to do that, unless you instead tell them to sound like something else. (And even then, there are still similarities.)
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
True. This is just an LLM cliché detector, highlighting stylistic habits they're currently prone to. You'll start noticing them everywhere when you internalize the patterns.
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.
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).
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.
> "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.
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.
Tangential, but I remember when I was studying for the ACT, there was something in one of the practice books that stuck with me. I'm paraphrasing but it was something like "Good writing is clear and easy to understand. It's about communication, make sure you communicate".
It was something that I guess I logically knew but hadn't fully realized. I had always tried to be fancy with my writing and pad it out to meet minimum word counts, with "understand-ability" being somewhat of an afterthought. Just that one statement in my ACT prep book made me, in my opinion, a significantly better writer.
> "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 talking. Say less! But not too little either.
So, not in fact the length of the text, which is constant at 200 pages.
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.
As the saying goes: “If I had more time, I would’ve written a shorter letter”
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.
Yeah, this comic summarizes the issue pretty well: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
> 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!)
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.
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.
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.
Indeed,
This is true, although I can still get behind "use fewer cliches" regardless :)
AI is so original that it can’t make cliches out of decently-worn phrases and constructions by itself.
It's just following what the prompt says, something like:
fake prompt> To sound smart, use as much literary tricks from LinkedIn Grow Hackers as possible.
If they prompt asked to sound like Strawberry Shortcake, the AI pudding would be full of berry interesting cooking analogies.
The interesting thing is that LLMs sound kind of like LinkedIn Growth Hackers even if you don't explicitly tell them to do that, unless you instead tell them to sound like something else. (And even then, there are still similarities.)
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.
Project doing something similar: http://slopwash.com
Cleans up content. Less about critiquing and giving feedback, more just “give me the better output”
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)
This is a genuinely useful tool with a shitty self-sabotaging name.
Name seems fine. Catchy, and I knew what I did before opening link.
And it's unnecessarily rude. Grammarly and Hemingway can identify the same sort of issues without "you are a stupid robot" vibes.
... the problem is it is rude to LLMs? i think they can handle it.
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.
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!
It's not purporting to be an LLM detector. Your 2000s era posts probably do have some sloppy cliches in them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
True. This is just an LLM cliché detector, highlighting stylistic habits they're currently prone to. You'll start noticing them everywhere when you internalize the patterns.
But you named it as though it's an AI detector.
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.
Yeah, "don't overuse these patterns" is the right attitude for tools like this, not "fix all mistakes". And that's OK?
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).
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...
>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.
> "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.
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.
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.
Run it locally, Github is linked on the bottom left:
https://github.com/awnist/slop-cop