this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2026
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Might have more luck if you switched to the lazy em dash that is just two normal dashes.
I think that the people trying to call out slop are doing more to hurt those competing with AI than AI itself.
Like someone using AI to produce stuff might get annoyed at being called out but then will probably just think "ok, gotta prompt it to avoid these signs" or waits for a newer model or just dgaf that people notice it's AI.
But people producing their own things and being accused of it being AI must feel pretty fucking discouraged that not only do they need to compete with something that can output things in a fraction of the time, but even when they do, some people accuse them of being what they hate.
For text content, IMO it should be taken based on what is said rather than who (or what) said it. If it's useless slop, there will be things to push back on other than the formatting. Plus, it wouldn't surprise me if you could just add "format it like a low effort forum post" to the prompt to get it to avoid some of the more obvious formatting tells.
Also, if people religiously call out AI slop when they see it, that could be used to automate training similar to what I'm sure happened to drastically improve programming capabilities, which will accelerate the speed at which they can become indistinguishable from things produced by real people.
That works some places, and not others -- like here it shows after saving the message, but not during editing. I hop through many different environments, I prefer to keep to the core set of things that work everywhere.
Yeah, that's fair. And it's also fair to just ignore those calling things you make slop and keep doing what you're doing, though it sucks that there's another polarizing issue like that dividing people for no good reason when they are actually on the same side (assuming they actually care about real content and aren't just using it as an excuse to troll).
100% salient and true points.
In addition to possibly training models, calling out slop either doesn't matter because it's obvious to everyone, or doesn't matter because perhaps it's wrong. It's like the old cries of "SCRIPTED!" over on reddit. Either people can figure it out, or just let them enjoy the content. Nothing ruins it like all the little kids thinking they're so super smart and calling out whatever they call out. Now it's "AI!!!!"
I did for a little while try out using LLMs to help organize my thoughts a few times. I stopped because it wasn't that helpful — people are either going to read what I write or not, but if they're not going to read what I write, they won't read what an LLM writes — but I found that I could easily do as you posited: "Compose this reply as a response to a post in a forum. Do not use em dashes or emoticons or markdown or bullet points" is all you need for it to churn the reply out in paragraphs.
The only times I'm tempted to use the technique now (which I don't) would be when some asshat is being willfullly ignorant and someone is wrong on the internet and I get angry at them, and I really should have an LLM rewrite my reply to get rid of the anger, because it only hurts the points I want to make. lol.
But I think that's possibly one of the few uses of an LLM that might genuinely be helpful: "Take my text and make it easier to understand" - as I have ADHD, sometimes I skip over important points I want to make and people get confused, and then I get irritated because they don't understand. lol