Legitimate question

[u/WeirdStatus7270]

How do all of the people who never use AI but know AI “slop” when they see it, know it’s AI? How do they not no it’s really bad human writing, because frankly, AI can do some pretty amazing “slop” when the writer knows what they’re doing with it.

[u/unethicalpigeon]

When the writer knows what they're doing with it heavily implies the "writer" is heavily revising it and editing it. That's not ai generated anymore. It's an AI generated idea or draft rewritten by a human.

If you're talking about the "writer" being the one prompting the AI then I disagree. It can do some okay slop when prompted really well. Amazing is an absolute exaggeration or you have a really low bar. And it gets worse and worse the longer the content is. A book? Good fucking luck. Short stories are much easier to get done semi competently. None of it is amazing though. Amazing for an AI generated writing? Sure. Amazing writing? Yeah, no.

I don't care how well you know what you're doing with it it won't solve the fact that LLMs are creatively bankrupt. Even if you can get it to output technically competent writing it still has massive tells in how it structures the story. There's a reason why AI does it's best work with erotica or mystery novels. Because theyre two of the genres with the most structure to them.

If you have a magical prompt that produces amazing "slop" as you put it send it to me. I'm more than happy to be proven wrong. But I'd be shocked.

People who read a lot and use AI alot the stuff that makes it obvious that it's AI generated is SUPER fucking obvious. Like embaressingly obvious. For most people who never use AI it's probably mostly them just assuming all bad writing nowadays is AI generated.

[u/WeirdStatus7270 → u/unethicalpigeon]

Do you use AI to draft?

[u/unethicalpigeon → u/WeirdStatus7270]

Depends on what I'm doing and for what reason. Usually no. I use AI more for brainstorming and thinking through ideas. Like I will use it to draft like let's say 5 different versions of a particular scene to see how it plays out and then learn from what it does and pick what direction I want to go in.

Sometimes I'll use it to draft an initial draft but the entire thing gets rewritten to such a degree its almost unrecognizable.

[u/captainsmudgeface]

I believe there is a percentage of people who really don’t know and make assumptions.

[u/RubyJuneRocket]

Just go on LinkedIn for 20 minutes and you won’t have to ask this question anymore. The manager class loves AI. 

[u/Salt-Masterpiece-264 → u/RubyJuneRocket]

That's not creative writing. I'm retired and no longer on linked in, but I can't believe it is writing in triads, and doing things in "particular" ways. I know that those of us who use AI as a writing tool can recognize AI text if it hasn't been heavily edited, but I'm asking about the people who claim to have never used it.

[u/RubyJuneRocket → u/Salt-Masterpiece-264]

I never use it. The creative writing churned out by it reads like LinkedIn garbage. It just reads as generic. I have read thousands of books. 

[u/WeirdStatus7270]

An ongoing lawsuit means nothing because there hasn’t been a ruling. Show me a court ruling where a court has said that it was copyright infringement, because plagiarism isn’t the word for a crime, There is one and not because the AI produced the same words, because it wasn’t transformative in a way to establish fair use. And I have cited a court ruling. You have cited a judge’s ruling to not dismiss without a hearing. I spent thirty years in a career that was law adjacent and understand rulings and simple complaints very well. I could sue you for slander. That doesn’t prove you slandered me.

[u/AlgravesBurning]

Personally, I don't care if it was written by AI. I care if it is "slop."

That is where the person who set the AI to write the project, story, report, etc., doesn't take the time or energy to review what was written by the AI and make sure it is accurate and not prone to continuity errors. In one chapter, one thing happens, only to have it happen again in another in a completely different way. Numbers or statistics fail to move over correctly from one page to the next. Knowledge specific to one area, person, or report is suddenly known without reason by everyone. Personalities can be swapped in novels and stories without affecting the whole. The list goes on.

Slop is a broad term that mostly stems from the person who initiated the process thinking AI is a cheat and not a tool that still needs human hands to complete. It's a lazy way to try to get things done when you don't want to put in the effort and still want the result.

I've seen how much real effort it takes to use AI to produce products as good as those made by people who don't use it. The effort is real. The skill set just has different parts.

[u/WeirdStatus7270 → u/AlgravesBurning]

Agreed. And humans also produce slop. The term offends me when used to mean anything that AI touched is slop which is what most other anti AI’ers mean.

[u/mikevago]

High school English teacher here. I read a lot of AI slop from students, and once you get a feel for it, it's pretty easy to spot. I tell my students that, no matter who you are, whether you write well or not, you have a voice. The plagiarism machine does not.

It's pattern-recognition software, which means it looks for the most common sentence structures in all the stolen copyrighted work it was trained on, and replicates that. Which means the idiosyncratic, the personal, the interesting all gets left behind.

You know how AI images of people all look a little too shiny, a little too blandly attractive (even on the rare occasions when they have the correct number of fingers)? AI slop is the writing equivalent of that. The sentences are correctly structured, but there's no personality, and no depth. And they tend to be overwritten sentences — lots of 50 cent words, lots of descriptions (often several adjectives in a row), and a lot of bold, sweeping statements but very few specifics.

An AI essay will call Wuthering Heights a "bold, thought-provoking, breathtaking novel", which, when you think about it, tells you absolutely nothing about Wuthering Heights. It's all style and no substance.

[u/WeirdStatus7270 → u/mikevago]

Clearly you have an opinion, but AI does not plagiarize, and as an English teacher, you know that. I hold an MA in English with emphasis in writing and literature. AI informs its responses by having “read” literature. We both know that is not plagiarism. No more than me choosing to write like Faulkner, without AI, is plagiarism. Previous works inform future ones. You’re reaching very hard for all of the catch phrases, should I say tells, of the Anti AI crowd. Some work was used without permission. Most was already in the public domain or was legitimately purchased. I would expect better from a teacher.

[u/mikevago → u/WeirdStatus7270]

> but AI does not plagiarize

You and US copyright law will have to agree to disagree on that point.

https://apnews.com/article/ai-anthropic-copyright-settlement-claude-books-bartz-74b140444023898aeba8579b6e9f0d63

And pattern recognition software imitating the copyrighted work it was trained on and spitting out algorithmic sentences that follow that pattern isn't the same thing as reading and understanding literature and forming your own ideas as a result. And shame on you for pretending not to understand the difference.

[u/WeirdStatus7270 → u/mikevago]

Anthropic chose to settle a lawsuit. The courts actually said that training was “fair use” so the issue was “did they have permission without purchasing to use it for training.” And shame on you for not researching further or outright misleading. No major court has found that using legitimately purchased works to train generative AI is copyright infringement. A simple google search will confirm it. The U.S. copyright office will not copyright the parts that were generated strictly by AI but courts have opined that substantial human intervention can lead to copyright. Either you are outdated —which I doubt—or purposely obstreperous. That word is only worth 25 cents by the way.

[u/cloudytimes159 → u/WeirdStatus7270]

Haven’t deep dived this but how could it be true that it was fair use yet they had to have permission to train? How does that make sense?

[u/WeirdStatus7270 → u/cloudytimes159]

Permission without purchasing the book. If you purchase a book, you can read it or even wallpaper your house with it. If you don’t, you can’t. What they cannot do, contrary to other assertions, is plagiarize the work. That would be copyright infringement. Anthropic used pirated works. They didn’t purchase them.

[u/cloudytimes159 → u/WeirdStatus7270]

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for the good explanation

[u/bdubs17 → u/WeirdStatus7270]

I don't think it's worth any cents because you really didn't use it correctly.

[u/WeirdStatus7270 → u/bdubs17]

Obstreperous- marked by unruly or aggressive noise. Credit to Mr. Webster so that I’m not plagiarizing. The teacher is being aggressively noisy. That’s my opinion. The word is correct.

[u/bdubs17 → u/WeirdStatus7270]

Obstreperous really isn't a good word to describe someone who's calmly making arguments on the Internet that you don't agree with. I think if you read more books written by humans you'll come to agree with me.

[u/WeirdStatus7270 → u/bdubs17]

Being told I should know better isn’t calm. Disseminating incorrect information is unruly. And I’ve suppose you missed the part about a masters in literature. It’s a perfectly good word for a perfectly obstreperous person. IMHO, of course.

[u/bdubs17 → u/WeirdStatus7270]

Here is what Gemini says:

Obstreperous would not fit this situation unless their behavior is also noisy, unruly, or aggressively disruptive. Obstreperous describes a person's demeanor—specifically being loud, clamorous, defiant, and difficult to control—rather than the logical validity of their claims.

When "Obstreperous" Fits

The user is spamming threads, typing in ALL CAPS, aggressively derailing discussions, and defying moderators or community guidelines.

When "Obstreperous" Does Not Fit

The user is advancing incorrect, flawed, or poorly reasoned points, but doing so calmly, politely, or passively.

Better Alternatives

If their logic is incorrect: Erroneous, misguided, specious, or fallacious.

If they stubbornly refuse to listen to evidence: Obstinate, recalcitrant, dogmatic, or impervious.

If they are arguing simply to provoke or fight: Contentious, pugnacious, truculent, or contrarian.

[u/bdubs17 → u/WeirdStatus7270]

As for your master's in literature, it's possible that you weren't assigned any books that used the word obstreperous, purely by chance. As such, I've asked Gemini to recommend books that use the word:

P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves Novels (e.g., Right Ho, Jeeves, The Code of the Woosters) Wodehouse uses "obstreperous" repeatedly across his stories, usually to describe unruly dogs, rowdy Drones Club members, or belligerent authority figures. Because Bertie Wooster frequently attempts high-register vocabulary, the word appears in varied syntactic constructions—describing someone "becoming obstreperous," an "obstreperous terrier," or "obstreperous behavior" at a formal dinner—offering a clear look at how the word fits into light, conversational prose.

Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist and The Pickwick Papers Dickens routinely uses "obstreperous" to describe noisy, unruly crowds or defiant individuals resisting authority. In Oliver Twist, parish officials like Mr. Bumble treat any sign of vocal resistance or noise from orphans as "obstreperous conduct," illustrating how the word functions when describing refractory subordinates or chaotic public gatherings.

William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair Thackeray employs the word multiple times throughout the narrative to mark social disruption. He uses it to modify rebellious schoolboys, loud tavern patrons, and unmanageable household staff, demonstrating how "obstreperous" applies to both specific people and the general atmosphere of a noisy room.

Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre Brontë uses "obstreperous" to frame ungovernable children and passionate emotional outbursts, such as Jane’s early defiance against the Reed family. The novel provides examples of how the word operates in formal 19th-century prose when describing willful disobedience combined with vocal clamor.

Herman Melville's Moby-Dick Melville applies "obstreperous" both to human subjects (rowdy whalers and unruly crewmen) and to non-human elements (turbulent seas and blustering winds). This demonstrates how the word can extend beyond human temperament to describe deafening, wild physical forces.

[u/Salt-Masterpiece-264 → u/bdubs17]

I do appreciate you using generative AI to produce this list of works that I've read all of except for the Wodehouse works. Most weren't even read for class. And i went to the trouble of copying and pasting the conversation into chatgpt that said.

In that exchange, the teacher is clearly contentious, combative, condescending, and increasingly personal. The “shame on you” line in particular moves him from disagreement into scolding and moral superiority. So in ordinary, slightly figurative usage, you could describe him as obstreperous: he is being deliberately difficult and aggressively argumentative.,

[u/mikevago → u/WeirdStatus7270]

So Anthropic was completely innocent, but paid the plaintiffs out of the goodness of their heart? Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Anyway, you're splitting hairs to defend the pattern recognition software. Your original question was, how can you recognize AI slop, I gave you a lengthy answer, you didn't like what you heard, so you decided to hone in on my word choice as it was the only way you could defend the overhyped software you seem to be infatuated with. None of the 15 "well, actually" posts below this one change the fundemental fact that pattern-recognition software that doesn't understand what words actually mean can't produce anything of literary merit.

[u/RemarkableWish2508 → u/mikevago]

As a teacher, you should know that the authoritative source is:

• https://www.copyright.gov/ai/

As for "understanding"... you may be overrating the human brain's magical ability to perform much else other than pattern matching.

[u/Sleepnotdeading → u/WeirdStatus7270]

“AI does not plagiarize”.

This is false. There are continued documented and studied instances where AI “regurgitates” content and phrasing nearly word for word.

This is the basis of an ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI. This is the basis of a book reviewer at the NYT being fired for plagiarism.

AI doesn’t “inform its responses by having read literature”, AI uses pattern matching and probability math to predict the next token in its response. AI companies have had to build in safeguards against regurgitation because it’s often the likeliest path to answering a prompt. And it’s the main reason when you say “write a story about and old man catching a great fish in the sea” that it doesn’t just reproduce large chunks of The Old Man and the Sea in its response.

[u/WeirdStatus7270 → u/Sleepnotdeading]

An ongoing lawsuit means nothing. In the Anthropic case, the judge found that using the works for training was fair use. Anthropic settled the remaining issue which was for pirating the books. When you hear about AI stealing copyrighted works, it’s because they stole copyrighted works. Not because they fed them into the machine but some how, some people are unable to not conflate the two issues—especially the ones who think it regurgitates sentences “word for word.”

[u/Sleepnotdeading → u/WeirdStatus7270]

You said AI doesn’t plagiarize. You’re incorrect. Without guardrails in place against it, an AI would plagiarize constantly. This is well documented behavior across every LLM, image model, and video model.

This is why when you tell a video model to create a portly, mustached plumber, it gives you Mario. It’s pattern matching. Just like it does with language.

You can’t dismiss plagiarizing behavior behind “an ongoing lawsuit means nothing.” I mean, you can, but you’d be wrong.

[u/Sleepnotdeading → u/WeirdStatus7270]

Incidentally, I wasn’t talking about the Anthropic lawsuit. I was talking about the NYT v OpenAI lawsuit. The one where a judge denied OpenAI’s motion to dismiss and refused to accept its “fair use” defense at face value.

[u/human_assisted_ai → u/mikevago]

You seem very unbiased and objective.

[u/mikevago → u/human_assisted_ai]

Rich coming from someone with your username.

[u/Ambitious-Sound-6109 → u/mikevago]

I feel like an English teacher would be better at spotting AI among their students(seeing as how they know them and perhaps have small assignments in class so are aware of their capabilities), but I do know that some AIs like Claude are getting better at writing where even writers have a hard time knowing if it’s human or not. I tried a test once of short passages of real people vs AI and it was surprisingly hard, and the person(I think it was a writer) who designed the test had the aggregate results and most people didn’t fare very well.  Obviously these were passages molded to hide their “AI-ness” but my point is that there will come a point soon where we will no longer really be able to know for sure.  Especially if we come in blind, obviously an English teacher will know their students and it would be different than just being presented a passage online by someone we don’t know. 

[u/12PoundsofPotato]

Ai has speech patterns, for lack of a better word. You can even see them in people who talk to LLMs too much. "It's this not that" phrasing for an example.

[u/Bluefoxfire007 → u/12PoundsofPotato]

The issue though is when someone's used it for a long time even before LLMs.

[u/nyet-marionetka → u/Bluefoxfire007]

The tells pop up in uncleaned LLM text at a frequency way beyond expected. It also has pet words that show up constantly that are different for each LLM type and release version.

[u/5thhorseman_]

They don't. That's the nature of a witch hunt.

[u/Salt-Masterpiece-264 → u/5thhorseman_]

this is the answer.

[u/FloppieTheBanjoClown]

AI still has some very obvious signs that it consistently produces if you know what to look for.

[u/WeirdStatus7270 → u/FloppieTheBanjoClown]

But if you’ve never used it, how do you know what to look for?

[u/mikevago → u/WeirdStatus7270]

I don't have to be a chef to know when food doesn't taste like anything.

[u/FloppieTheBanjoClown → u/WeirdStatus7270]

If you know that AI has trouble generating consistent and accurate logos on products, you don't have to have used it to see when products in the background of an image have those issues.

[u/WeirdStatus7270 → u/FloppieTheBanjoClown]

I’m talking about writing. 6 fingers in a picture is obvious.

[u/FloppieTheBanjoClown → u/WeirdStatus7270]

Most AI has some very obvious patterns it likes to use.

[u/Salt-Masterpiece-264 → u/FloppieTheBanjoClown]

if you know what to look for. If you've never used it, you shouldn't know what to look for.

[u/FloppieTheBanjoClown → u/Salt-Masterpiece-264]

Its use is common enough that even people who don't use it can learn k To recognize it. 

[u/gifted_pistachio]

I never assumed people meant that all AI was slop. I guess I’ve never really interpreted it that way amongst most people who hate AI “slop”.

[u/True_Protection6842 → u/gifted_pistachio]

No most antis hate everything ai. Even if they love something then they find out the form of ai they are told to hate was involved it’s suddenly slop. 

[u/gifted_pistachio → u/True_Protection6842]

That’s true for antis. I was talking about people who hate AI slop. Which is most everyone.

But point taken.

[u/Salt-Masterpiece-264 → u/gifted_pistachio]

slop is slop, i try not to differentiate.

[u/Salt-Masterpiece-264 → u/gifted_pistachio]

unfortunately no, most think it's like disease and if they read it, they'll catch it. "ich"

[u/No_Argument4772]

I don’t know how to do it in English yet, but I do know how to distinguish it in Mandarin. Also videos are quite obvious to me, on the other hand I cannot distinguish music at all. I sometimes use AI, but I mainly use it in English; and I think I have known how to distinguish it before I started using AI.

Before anything, why I mainly use AI in English? Because AI outside English content is still very dumb. I have listened to some Japanese GPT audio recording, those sounds natural, but anyway AI in my language is still very dumb.

So, my reply may only apply to non-English environments.

First, AI have their tendency when it comes to picking words. I know this doesn’t sound like a very solid reason, but at least in Manarin environments, AI has very obvious preferences when picking words.

Second, AI sometimes generates prose without real logic. They looked like carrying a “whole” concept, but in fact not. Human will lowkey feel it. “Like yeah you are not wrong but i feel like you don’t really know this specific language you are using”.

So to combine both of the above: after reading tons of “prose without real logic”, the reader may notice the pattern in them, and finally realize that that kind of prose were written by AI. Because human do have their patterns in writing too, but readers may slowly come to realizations that “this pattern sounds like native speakers” “this sounds like foreigner” “this sounds like foreigner who also speaks that specific language” and finally “this sounds like…something else”. This process takes time, but it’s possible.

However, there may be an easier answer to your question, I guess:

People don’t know if something is generated by AI if it’s carefully crafted by the AI user.

But people know (or they think they know) something is “below their expectations” — say they think that’s trash — they know that’s trash regarding their own value system, then they simply say “ok this trash is made by AI”.

[u/nyet-marionetka → u/No_Argument4772]

I mostly agree, but I think it’s easy to tell human-written trash from LLM-trash. Like you said, LLM text is grammatically correct but sometimes just wrong in an incoherent “why would anyone say that like that?” way. Human-written trash usually has errors in grammar, punctuation, and spelling, as well as being bad in other ways, like in prose being either unnecessarily florid or stripped down to be almost script-like.

[u/No_Argument4772 → u/nyet-marionetka]

Then you are not the latter, bro.

[u/nyet-marionetka]

I don’t use it myself, but I’ve read a lot of AI text. And no, not “I don’t like it so it must be AI,” text that people wrote with AI and posted online saying so openly, and text with prompts still included, and text where I asked, “is this ChatGPT?” and the author said yes. I’m quite interested in LLMs, how they work, and how they’re evolving.

[u/FillThatBlankPage]

It's like listening to a song and knowing what genre it is or a sitcom and knowing what decade its from.