If you have spent any significant amount of time reading prose generated by modern LLMs you have undoubtedly noticed an uncanny, repetitive cadence.
Even when an LLM writes technically accurate prose, it frequently defaults to a predictable bag of rhetorical tricks:
"Not out of fear. Not out of malice. But out of cold calculation."
"He stilled. The room froze. A beat."
"The terminal moved the way terminals move in the dead of night."
"She spoke with the quiet patience of someone who had survived this before."
This is AI Writing Slop. It is dramatic, theatrical, and fundamentally repetitive.
To permanently eradicate this across our automated writing pipelines and coding assistants, I built and published deslop-copyeditor—an autonomous agent skill and plugin compatible with Google Antigravity, Claude Code, and Cursor.
Here is a breakdown of why language models do this, the 5 rhetorical patterns we banned, and how to enforce clean, direct human prose.
The 5 Rhetorical Tics of AI Writing
1. Negative Pairings & Contrastive Negation
LLMs love defining things by what they are not before stating what they are:
- ❌ "It wasn't a failure of code. It was a failure of vision."
- ❌ "Not with haste. Not with panic. Just steady, quiet resolve."
The Fix: Ban contrasting negation. State reality directly:
- ✔️ "The vision failed."
- ✔️ "She worked steadily."
2. Staccato Micro-Prose
In an attempt to manufacture cinematic tension, models frequently output 2-word sentence fragments:
- ❌ "He stopped. A beat. The logs flickered."
The Fix: Hard rule: Zero sentences under 3 words, and no two consecutive sentences under 5 words. Sentences must convey complete, meaningful thoughts.
3. Comparative Tautologies
Models frequently attempt poetic flair by comparing an object or action to itself:
- ❌ "The architecture moved the way distributed systems move when latency spikes."
- ❌ "The room felt heavy the way empty offices feel at midnight."
The Fix: Direct observation. If a network partition degraded cluster throughput, say so plainly without comparing it to a hypothetical clone of itself.
4. The Phantom Spectator (with the X of someone who Y)
Whenever an AI wants to convey mood, it invents a hypothetical third party:
- ❌ "He clicked deploy with the measured caution of an engineer who had taken down production."
The Fix: Be straightforward and grounded:
- ✔️ "He clicked deploy cautiously."
5. The Overrepresented AI Lexicon
Certain adjectives and sensory words appear in AI writing at rates orders of magnitude higher than in natural human corpora:
-
controlled,precise,deliberate,measured,efficient,particular,quietly,hum,fluorescent,ozone,catalogue,rhythm.
The Fix: Explicit blacklisting. When the model is forbidden from leaning on these crutches, it is forced to use concrete verbs and specific nouns.
Before & After Transformation Benchmarks
| Raw LLM Prose | Sanitized by deslop-copyeditor
|
Core Violation Fixed |
|---|---|---|
| "Not out of haste. Not out of anger. Just a cold, precise desire to finish the pipeline." | "He wanted to finish the pipeline." | Banned Negative Pairings & Cliché Modifiers (precise) |
| "The server went dark. A beat. Then — the terminal stilled." | "The server shut down and the terminal session closed." | Eliminated Staccato Micro-Prose (< 3 words) |
| "He reviewed the PR with the careful patience of someone who had seen systems burn." | "He reviewed the PR carefully and patiently." | Stripped Hypothetical Third-Party Observer |
| "The architecture moved the way distributed architectures move when network partitions strike." | "Network partitions degraded cluster routing performance." | Banned Comparative Tautology (the way X does) |
How to Use deslop-copyeditor
deslop-copyeditor is open source and distributed as a universal agent skill and Antigravity plugin.
1. Google Antigravity Plugin
agy plugin install https://github.com/Labreo/deslop-copyeditor
2. Universal One-Line Installer (npx)
If you use Claude Code, Cursor, or want a project-level skill:
# Auto-detects and installs to your local agent directory
npx deslop-skill install
3. CLI Prose Auditor
You can also run it in CI/CD or locally to audit your articles or docs for AI writing anti-patterns:
npx deslop-skill check my-article.md
Open Source & Contributions
The repository is live on GitHub:
👉 github.com/Labreo/deslop-copyeditor
Star the repo, try it on your drafts, and let me know in the comments which AI writing ticks bother you the most!
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