AI Slop and the Responsibility of Sending
Maybe you have heard of AI slop, internet content that ranges from AI generated videos to entire websites generated with AI. It also includes emails and social media posts that bear the hallmarks of AI writing, that call attention to themselves as being AI written.
What Does Slop Look Like in Writing?
Fake Depth: “It’s not X, it’s Y.” “This is not about mastery. It’s about remembering.” This is one of the more common AI turns of phrase these days that AI uses to help us feel like we are experiencing something deep and profound as we interact with it.
False Intimacy: “Let’s face it…” This mimics human voice but just comes off as a little cheesy, like we are really leveling with someone when the ideas are just not that deep.
Setup for Savior: “That’s where [tool/idea] comes in.” This one I think really lines up with the sycophancy issue – it’s its subtle way of telling us how genius something is.
Fake Enthusiasm: “And that’s what makes it so exciting.” I feel like this enthusiasm makes users want to keep using the platform, but ends up just coming off as false.
Polished Parallelism: Sentences that line up too neatly, like “We innovate with purpose, create with passion, and lead with integrity.” I am an English professor, so don’t get me wrong, I love a good parallel sentence, but come on.
Em Dashes: “AI loves em dashes—they feel spontaneous, almost like thought itself—and that little illusion of humanity is hard to resist.” Em dashes are one of the hallmarks of AI writing; AI just can’t help itself, even when you beg it not to.
Transition Word Overload: “Ultimately,” “Importantly,” “At the end of the day…”, “In other words,” “Simply put,” I tell my students they are allowed 1 transition word per paragraph. In reality, most humans write with far fewer transition words.
Buzzword Engineering: “By leveraging innovation, we can unlock potential.” South Park viewers will remember the “Marijuana Platform for Global Innovation.”
Authentic writing is tricky. How do we know what will strike a reader as slop and what will strike a reader as a genuine human message? What about human writers who love em dashes and transition words?
With AI writing, these come rapid fire through the text, hollow phrase after hollow phrase. When readers see an em dash followed by an “its not x its y” leading into a perfectly tight parallel list, that AI voice just starts to ring in our ears. As writers and slop editors, it is not our job to cleanse all our writing of every one of these tropes, but to make sure they don’t hit a critical mass so that dreaded thought appears in the mind of the reader: “This sounds like AI; did they use AI for this?”
We Are All Just Slop Editors Now
For those of us who like to cut corners and be as efficient as possible (raises hand), this is not great news. The myth of AI is that it will help make writing better, faster, and more fun. But the reality of using AI well means that if AI has played any role in something we’re about to send to another human, something that matters even a little, we need to carefully review every word before we hit send.
Even six months ago during my AI workshops I would encounter people afraid to use AI to help them compose; they worried that using AI to write an email was somehow cheating, or plagiarism, or just plain icky. I would reassure those reluctant AI users that from a communication and rhetoric point of view, so long as they went through every word in their message and adjusted to make sure it fit their tone and purpose, so long as they owned every word they eventually sent, they were good; so long as they avoided sending slop.
But in a very short period, the guardrails have come off and concerns about whether writers even need to cite their AI use have been blown through; I love this development, by the way. Probably due to hype and narratives of inevitability, many more users seem to be using AI to write in an unchecked way, and the slop grows every day. Maybe it is time to return to some restraint and shame. We should be afraid of sending slop.
Here’s why.
1. We can tell.
The purpose of writing is to engage the reader in the message. The last thing a writer wants is a reader to wonder, Did AI write this? At this point the message is lost and the reader may be spiraling in all sorts of directions, none of which are good for the writer to get their message across reliably and credibly.
When you send slop, when you don’t edit out the telltale hallmarks of AI in a message, we can tell. We can spot it a mile away—the tone, the rhythm, the fake humility. (I hope you can see the slop here. Apologies, I couldn’t help myself, such an earnest and sincere piece of slop 🤮)
Here is what seems like a daily complaint on Reddit/ChatGPT:
So if you are using AI to compose, best to be using it enough to know its telltales and edit that shit out because the rest of us are at minimum annoyed and at maximum doubting your credibility altogether. I know u/poisonwinds is with me here.
2. You don’t want to be responsible for the consequences of slop.
I am not proud to admit I’ve sent instructions to students that skipped steps because AI rewrote my directions, or added new ones out of nowhere. I know a colleague who had to answer performance review questions that were obviously generated slop, just circular and unfocused. It made her feel her time wasn’t valued. I also just read a Facebook post from an entrepreneur friend of mine with the telltale this isn’t x, it’s y. The friend is dear, but I puked a little in my mouth when I saw it. Don’t be that person. You don’t want your name attached to something you half-assed with AI.
3. Your Reader Matters
In the real world, messages are from humans to humans. So take the time to read what you send. Make sure you mean it. Own every word. Show that you care about the human on the other side.
Writing is an act of human attention. AI didn’t ruin that. We did, the moment we stopped caring about our reader enough to read what we were sending to them and make sure the message was truly from us.
That is, unless you’re writing to your insurance company, your internet provider, an AI using an AI engineered prompt, or any customer-service bot that already speaks fluent slop. In that case, go ahead and slop away.
If you have any favorite tell tale AI tropes that drive you nuts, please share them in the comments.
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