Once upon a time in 2018 I posted a few of my written articles to Reddit and got some replies where I was accused of "posting low quality responses with low quality articles." A general theme in the comments was that the articles weren't thought out and my articles "lacked an ending".
Each to their own, I thought to myself. In hindsight though, I think they have had a point. A bit of my writing was sloppy and hastily written with typos. Plus the way I replied to posts with a link to my website saying "I recently wrote about this here..." is annoying. Imagine if someone did this in real life, and instead of answering a question would just answer with self-promotion instead. Anyway, all of this is to say that I'm experienced with bad writing.
Everything is slop
Before I begin, a quick refresher on what AI slop is. It's low-quality, low-effort mass-produced content generated by AI. There's no human curation or refinement. In software engineering, it is commonly used to describe the subpar code that LLMs produce. But it can also be images, text or video.
AI-generated slop writing is everywhere. Since AI-aided writing became a thing, there were trademark LLM-isms in the writing, such as the obvious em dash (—). This was annoying and made AI-aided writing obvious. But it wasn't everywhere. Then a friend introduced me to tropes.md, a markdown file that attempts to make AI writing more human-like. But instead of being a helpful resource, it ruined the Internet even more for me. The Internet's decline is progressing the same way a middle-aged man loses his hair. Little bits fall out and you think "there's no coming back from that. Soon I'll be bald". By the way, probably not a hot take but in my opinion the downfall of the Internet began around 2010.
The tropes.md document goes through the current LLM-isms. And now I can't read an article without spotting a "genuinely", em dash, "quietly", always adding , before an "and" (commonly called the Oxford Comma) or some over-dramatic rambling and phrasing, or repeating what was just said using different words split up into two short sentences. For example "The invention of the motorcar quietly changed the tapestry of the game for good. It's no longer about driving — it's about freedom. Now people drive. All the time. This wasn't just a motorcar, it was a lifestyle choice."
And now I either can't unsee it, or it has become way more prevalent. It's even obvious in some YouTube videos. The creator has quite obviously got AI to generate the script for them and then they read it out. I won't call them out by name about how nauseating their AI-created scripts are, but it's safe to say that I've noticed some popular creators doing it.
LinkedIn is one of the worst places for it, where people that should have known better will post AI-generated content. It's enough to make me physically wince. AI-generated images are everywhere too. The same colour schemes and similar layouts. Then these people have the gall to watermark the image with their username as if they have taken hours of effort and thinking to generate the post. If someone does have English as a second language then I could be more lenient on them. But then again, they could also be more thoughtful of other people and not post their AI slop. There are people that I have followed for a while and seen their pre-AI posts. I know that they can string perfectly good sentences together. However, now they are using AI to help them with their writing, as though AI-assistants are going to leave soon so they need to get as much use out of them as possible. This is also something that bothers me. Why did they even let AI help them write, when they were an even better writer before AI?
The implication of a collection of LLM-isms (i.e. all the trademark tells of AI slop) is that people will think that the writer couldn't be bothered creating the content. There was no love involved in creating the output. So why should anyone show any love for reading or hearing it.
Hollow praise and platitudes
On top of the AI-slop posts, there is a tendency for LLMs to come across as "sycophantic". You've probably noticed this in the responses when using an LLM. They are generally too friendly. For me, this became obvious when moving over from ChatGPT 3.5 to one of Anthropic's earlier models. I noticed that the Anthropic model was much more friendly and gave out praise when it wasn't needed. It was overly positive about everything. Great idea! or Excellent question or the way it would soften criticism, like using the Compliment Sandwich style of feedback. Models also have a tendency to make things up.
All of this is largely a byproduct of how models are trained. When there is human feedback in reinforcement learning (called RLHF), humans tend to give higher ratings to responses that affirm their beliefs, or responses that sound confident or validate their opinion. And then the reinforcement learning the model does will optimise for responses that are rated highly by humans. So the model learns that agreeable responses correlate with what a good response is. This leads to things like the response sounding confident even if it may not be the truth.
It should be noted here that not all models face this issue. It only seems to be ones trained with human feedback (commonly referred to as RLHF-trained models).
There have been some interesting studies on this too. In one case, it was found that as a model gets larger/is tuned more with RLHF, it will become more sycophantic since the model is better at detecting what response the user wants to hear.
Everything is slop
As I mentioned earlier, this way of using an LLM as a helper for writing is something that is starting to affect all writing. Anyone that has easy access to AI tools can enhance their writing and, as we're dealing with humans that usually just want to get their message out as fast as they can with minimal effort, they turn to AI to help them. As a writer and a connoisseur of quality, this is painful and embarrassing to watch.
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