The term for pasting raw, unread AI output into a conversation, shifting the work of reading, verifying, and distilling onto whoever receives it. It's kind of rude, really, with real costs: eroded trust and frustration for recipients as the behavior becomes more common. The fix: read it, verify it, cut it down, disclose it, and...
Tags slop (26)
Corporate earnings calls and press releases show the most obvious AI writing tic of 2025 – that “not just X, it’s Y” construction. It went from ~50 mentions in 2023 to over 200 in 2025. Microsoft, Cisco, McKinsey, Accenture: all guilty. (Amanda Silberling, TechCrunch)
tropes.md is a one-file blacklist of AI writing tells for your system prompt.
Contrastive negation used to be a rhetorical device, now it screams “I used ChatGPT”
This is the future, not a newsletter. When you define something by saying what it's not, it's called "contrastive negation." Nowadays, it's a telltale of AI writing. You can see it all over Threads and LinkedIn. At the same time, the bros are feeding chatbots the Wikipedia definition of "AI writing" and telling them to...
“The Washington Post last week rolled out AI-generated podcasts, ignoring internal reviews that found errors in AI scripts, like fabricated quotes, and had deemed more than two-thirds of them unpublishable.” (Max Tani, Semafor)
A Kenyan author on the supposed markers of AI-generated text: “The very things you identify as the fingerprints of the machine are, in fact, the fossil records of our education.” (Marcus Olang’, This Man’s Mind)
Slop Evader: A search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT’s first public release on November 30, 2022. (Tega Brain)
Swiss Tagesanzeiger reports on the business of junk content and automated pseudo-news. Fakes were spread about one of the article’s authors. The journalists spoke with a junk site operator who comes from the SEO world (of course) and thinks it’s all wonderful.
Channel4 had a segment about AI-driven job loss presented by an AI host—and the Guardian published a hilarious (if not predictably) takedown. (Stuart Heritage, The Guardian)
AI-generated ‘poverty porn’: Prominent NGOs use biased, sensationalized visuals in global health campaigns, perpetuating harmful tropes about the poor. (Aisha Down, The Guardian)
“Just an endless dribble of computer generated nonsens”: YouTuber millionaire Casey Neistat on OpenAI’s TikTok competitor Sora.
FOOM! This YouTube channel from Runway streams 24/7 AI-generated videos and it’s bad, but like, not all of is terrible garbage?! (via Sofie Hvitved)
The News Industry’s GenAI Cautionary Tales: Generative AI failures have shown, among other things, the value of scrutinizing outsourced work. (Clare Spencer, Generative AI in the Newsroom)
Don’t count on counting fingers: Reporter’s Guide to Detecting AI-Generated Content (Henk van Ess, Global Investigative Journalism Network)
Former Wondery exec Jeanine Wright launches Inception Point AI, flooding the zone with 5,000 AI-generated podcasts at $1 per episode. Her take: calling AI content “slop” makes you a “lazy luddite.” Sure. When your business model requires only 50 listeners per episode to turn a profit, maybe the bar isn’t exactly set at Pulitzer Prize level. (Caitlin Huston, Hollywood Reporter)
A short clip of a Will Smith concert looks like a crappy AI fake – but it’s not: “The crowds were real, but the videos were manipulated: first by Will Smith’s team, and then without asking, by YouTube.” (Andy Baio, waxy.org)
