A lot of similar pieces have not considered a post is both the first and final work of a thing: opinions, and experience, and less of much in cited facts; with AI, that there even was a revision pass at all.

I guess there is a kind of participatory element to the discourse where, if you want an audience, there is an editing process. Whereas in other cases, we wrote these as progress notes on an unknown journey, breadcrumbs or upturned stones to mark a path to the horizon.

Maybe it's the difference between writing as a mode of discovery, retreading the mental arc of a solution, and writing something honed to leave a mark.

"I have fantasized about sentencing the author to read them aloud, certain that they themselves will be unable to endure the slop that they are foisting upon the rest of us.)"

I wish that were true, but I fear it may not be.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/canadian-legislator-reads...

Blocked EVERY single LLM generated blog and content farm with uBlacklist.

Another great day where Google only gives me 2 results on the first page.

>to use an LLM to write is to void the social contract between writer and reader: we readers shouldn’t be expected to labor to understand a sentence that the writer themselves didn’t work to create.

Pretty much sums up the issue re: workplace lazy AI dumping on folks as well.

In a way, I think they're doing us a favor with LLM slop: It's rare to have a signal that's 100% accurate at telling me it's safe to stop reading.

I'm confused and disturbed by the need to invoke Pangram (a model) as the arbiter of slop here. Slop, like smut, is self evident. You know it when you see it. Yes, some effort may be required before realizing that something is slop, which, yeah, is annoying, but that's nothing in comparison to outsourcing your shiite detection to a model! What do you get, except the loss of self worth, by needing a model to have the confidence to call something slop?

> Why do people have this reaction? Beyond having to endure aggravating stylistic tics, when reading a piece that has had substantial LLM assistance, we — the readers — don’t know what is real and what isn’t.

This is well said. But, here too, I would pause and reflect on what it means to (think you) know what is real and what isn't in a pre-LLM setting. For example, authority bias predates LLMs, and can have disastrous consequences.

When I write technical documentation, here's how I use LLMs:

* If I need to learn something before I write about it, I rely on LLMs heavily to answer questions that I have about other source materials, e.g. to clear up ambiguities.

* I've recently started prompting it to find grammatical and spelling errors.

* And I've prompted it to find technical errors, places where I'm just wrong.

For all the prompting, I additionally tell it to not rewrite anything or offer any prose suggestions. It can keep all that to itself, thank you.

And I verify what it gives back for correctness.

(I'd encourage non-native speakers to use LLMs in much the same way. Don't sacrifice your human voice by letting the AI rewrite your words. Personally, I'd very much rather hear it from you, blemishes and all, than hear it from an AI.)

But if I could step back for a minute:

Why write anything?

If your writing goal is to flood the zone and make as much money as humanly possible from ads, then hell yeah, paperclip the everliving shit out of that.

But if your writing goal is to learn material or share material, then put that LLM on the back burner and don't use it to directly generate your text. It's bad for you, and the results are subpar.

When I'm learning something, I can go through reams of tokens and then, once I understand it, I digest that to single a paragraph about the topic. The paragraph is as concise and as helpful as I can make it. Now, I could just share the prompts that I went through with those pages of back-and-forth with the LLM... but wouldn't you rather just read the concise paragraph that gets the point across?

It's not hard to be better than an AI at writing for humans, so the minimum low bar to aim for is "better than an AI". And we can all get there with a small amount of practice. The real goal is to greatly exceed the LLMs' capabilities for sharing information.

Finally, I think everyone should write a lot. Blogs, morning pages, fiction, technical books, letters, whatever. Especially when it comes to technical content, nothing makes you do your research like putting your ass out in the ether to get flamed by 5 billion people. And teachers the world over know the best way to learn something is to teach it. Pick a topic, research, and write it up more clearly and concisely than anyone else ever has. You'll learn so much, and your readers will, as well. Writing fires up your brain. Don't give that up to an LLM.

if its not worth your time to write, its not worth my time to read

this goes 10x for all the slide decks and google docs and wikislop everyone's trying to pass off as an accomplishment lately

AI detection should NEVER be used in an educational setting where the only acceptable false positive rate is 0%. That being a rate that which will never be achieved.

Look, in the future we may get to a point where LLMs are indistinguishable from humans in writing style.

Even then, I would say that using an LLM is robbing you of the process of writing, a process that is crucial to developing and understanding your own ideas.

Think about the last time you wrote something for consumption and the sentence to sentence thought processes you’re going through. I bet a lot of that was “is that right?” Or “does that make sense?” Or “am I communicating this at the level of my reader?”.

All of that is fundamental to your readers understanding, but more importantly, its fundamental to YOUR understanding.