Ah, you've hit a classic problem with <SUBJECT> :smile_with_sweat_drop:. Your intuition is right-- but let me clarify some subtleties...

You can customize it to get rid of all that. I set it to the "Robot" personality and a custom instruction to "No fluff and politeness. Be short and get straight to the point. Don't overuse bold font for emphasis."

> Affirmations at the start of messages. ("That's a great idea!") With a brief pause when 5 launched. But it's back and worse than ever now.

What a great point! I also can’t stand it. I get it’s basically a meme to point it out - even South Park has mocked it - but I just cannot stand it.

In all seriousness it’s so annoying. It is a tool, not my friend, and considering we are already coming from a place of skepticism with many of the responses, buttering me up does not do anything but make me even more skeptical and trust it less. I don’t want to be told how smart I am or how much a machine “empathizes” with my problem. I want it to give me a solution that I can easily verify, that’s it.

Stop wasting my tokens and time with fake friendship!

The emoji thing is so bad. You can see it all over github docs and other long form docs. All section headers will have emojis and so on. Strange.

You can take my em-dashes from my cold, dead hands—I use them all the time.

Don't forget the classic: "It's not just X—it's Y."

Or... How can you detect the usage of Claude models in a writeup? Look for the word comprehensive, especially if it's used multiple times throughout the article.

I notice this less with GPT-5 and GPT-5-Codex but it has a new problem: it'll write a sentence that mostly makes sense but have one or two strange word choices that nobody would use in that situation. It tends to use a lot of very dense jargon that makes it hard to read, spitting out references to various algorithms and concepts in places that don't actually make sense for them to be. Also yesterday Codex refused a task from me because it would be too much work, which I thought was pretty ridiculous - it wasn't actually that much work, a couple hundred lines max.

I think it's the default behavior, because it's cheaper and faster to produce than the real answer.

I assume the beginning of the answer is given to a cheaper, faster model, so that the slower, more expensive one can have time to think.

It keeps the conversation lively and natural for most people.

Would be interesting to test if it's true, by disabling it with a system prompt, and measure if the time-to-answer is slower for the first word.

I was able to get it to briefly change that initial You’re right!! By telling it to say something else like Yarr Mayte. Stuck for a while.

I dont use ChatGPT very often, though perplexity has it, but I find that going all caps and sounding really angry helps them to fix things.

It’s a pity that em-dashes are being much more shunned due to their LLM association than emojis.

> Honestly, it's kind of helpful because it makes it really easy to recognize content that people have copied and pasted out of ChatGPT

Maybe it's intentional, like the "shiny" tone applied to "photorealistic" images of real people.

I am reasonably sure affirmations are a feature, not a bug. No matter how much I might disagree.

ChatGPT is made for normies—they love sweatdrop emojis. I recommend https://ai.dev

> This has side effect of making live performances by humans scarce and in valuable.

RIP take-home coding assignments.

That narrowing gap is where we humans find purpose and meaning.

If an impersonation of an opera singer can't be distinguished from the real thing, what would be the point of the real thing?

Gain-of-function research to create memetic-immune-system-evading AI variants.

> Ethics Statement

> Potential harms include: [...] (ii) attempts to evade AI-text detection.

And it's not clear to me how their mitigations would avoid fooling users (as opposed to algorithmic detection attempts).

Yeah, what this actually achieves if anything is making it harder to quickly recognize slop for what it is, so readers are more likely to give it the benefit of the doubt and keep their eyeballs on it for longer. Which I suppose is desirable if you're in the slop-mongering business (e.g. doing SEO spam or other such methods of flooding the commons with sewage for the sake of profit).

> I don't know if not getting the idea right, but I'm pretty sure people refer to AI outputs as "slop" not due to (only) repetitiveness. According to some sources:

Yeah, slop is low effort use of AI output ("ChatGPT, write me a blog post about using AI in industry X. Copy. Paste. Publish."). If anything this is should be called Stealthslop, and when slop is harder to detect we'll all waste more time on it.

I came here to say this -- it's going to be slop no matter what.

The LLM erotic roleplaying community's usage of "slop" aligns with the definition in this paper, so it's not without precedent. Several novel sampling methods have originated from that community trying to address this specific issue.

Honestly "slop" should also be retroactively applied to e.g. Buzzfeed content; it shouldn't just be AI-centric

In practice, it's used for anything the speaker doesn't approve of, regardless of quality. When someone uses it, it basically tells me, I don't have anything critical to say, beyond I don't like a thing.

Those higher level kinds of mode collapse are hard to quantify in an automated way. To fix that, you would need interventions upstream, at pre & post training.

This approach is targeted to the kinds of mode collapse that we can meaningfully measure and fix after the fact, which is constrained to these verbal tics. Which doesn't fix higher level mode collapse on semantics & creativity that you're identifying -- but I think fixing the verbal tics is still important and useful.

Wow it’s pretty sad to see one of my idols be kind of a hater on this. :(

diction, phraseology

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>That’s not what “slop” means

It's a new term so the meaning hasn't had a chance to settle. It's generally considered to be a negative term, so there's motivation for people to expand the definition to include things that they don't like. It is much easier to subvert a category than it is to make an argument for an individual item.

Imagine if people accept that falling rocks kill hundreds of people every year, and you wanted to convince them that falling cheese also kills plenty of people.

It would be much easier to imply that cheese, often coming in large roundish lumps, counts as a type of rock. It stretches the definition a bit but it's still much easier to argue than the actual falling cheese argument that is your actual agenda.

When the definition is new it is more malleable. Sometimes you might need a qualifier to declare it is different but imply it is essentially like the other thing. It's just a dairy-rock, or just enhanced-interrogation.

Slop is what you make, when I don't morally approve, or value critical nuance. WWE is slop, soap operas are slop, romance novels are slop, scifi is slop, etc.

Yep. Sanitized slop is still slop.

See the writing benchmarks here https://eqbench.com/creative_writing_longform.html

Not a benchmark per se, but there is a "Not x, but y" Slop Leaderboard:

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1lv2t7n/not_x_b...

100% of LLM output is slop. Done.

Does this actually work or would the slop just become more subtle?

I don't think that's a coincidence. Right now a lot of the business proposition for LLM bots is selling it to corporations as the ultimate corporate yes-man.

I'd say the majority of the training data is reddit with zero care about whether it's from a "good" or "sarcastic" or "ironic" source.

That is because corp speak is usually management-slop. A content devoid of ... content whose whole purpose is to make the author look important.

What a brilliant observation you’ve made.

Easy -- turn off the computer and have a competent human do the interview

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