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 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 a 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. It’s like a middle-aged man losing his hair. Little bits fall out and you think “there’s no coming back from that. Soon I’ll be bald”. Btw, in my opinion the downfall of the Internet started around 2008.

The tropes.md document mentioned the LLM-isms. And now I can’t read an article without spotting a “genuinely”, em dash, “quietly” or some over dramatic rambling phrasing and 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 I see it everywhere now. It’s even obvious in some YouTube videos. In some 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 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 like they have taken hours of effort and thinking to generate the post. If someone does have English as 2nd 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, like AI is going to leave soon so they need to get as much use out of it 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 (ie 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 due to the byproduct of how models are trained. Humans tend to give higher ratings to responses that affirm their beliefs, or 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, even if that response 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 more gets larger/is tuned more with RHLF, it will become more sycophantic since the model is better at detecting what response the user wants to hear.

Everything is slop

!CONCLUSION!