As a reader, reading AI-generated content brings up deep feelings of revulsion and makes it harder to connect to the author's content. But where does it come from?

Someone wrote a doc and circulated it at work the other day - “Guidelines for vibe-coded docs”. My colleague got tired of reading super long design docs generated by LLMs. Too many docs at work are getting thrown around with reams of nonsensical text. “As an author, you must own your [AI-generated] work” my colleague wrote. It’s been getting out of control.

It got me thinking about how prevalant AI writing slop is these days. It’s especially egregious if you’ve ever surfed Reddit or X or.. God forbid, LinkedIn lately.

Lately I’ve been catching myself cringing when I read Claude-isms show up in my social feeds. “It’s not X, it’s Y.” Claude has a very specific voice and it’s all over the place. I absolutely freaking hate it. You see, to me, using AI signals to me that you’re not using your brain. You don’t stand behind your words. You’re just good at generating… words. But you don’t even know what it means, and I don’t want to engage with it.

I was asking myself why my experience of this was so strong. I think it’s the same phenomenon as the Uncanny Valley - the closer a mechanically-generated thing gets to appearing human, the more it elicits feelings of revulsion or disgust. The original scholarship suggests it may be an artifact of evolutionary biology, or of deep religious or cultural cues.

But is it that simple? After doing a bit of soul searching, I’ve come to realize reading AI slop makes it easy to discount the author and disconnect from their thesis. Reading AI content feels… generic. AI content is too wordy. Or too concise. Too flowery. Doesn’t make sense. I can’t hear the author’s voice behind it. I’ve already disconnected with your content the moment I caught whiff of the “It’s not X, it’s Y” LLM author-isms.

But if I went even further down the path of introspection… reading AI slop brings up emotions of fear in me. Fear that my genuine strength – writing! – is becoming commoditized. And where will that leave me? I was always a bookish kid, good with words, involved with the creating writing mag at school, deeply into the blogging scene when that was a thing. We craved authenticity, good writing, praised the ability of the internet to create real, authentic connection through digital media - most of all, through words.

It feels like all of this is threatened by the massive firehose of technologically-empowered slop that threatens to bury my small little skills with sheer volume. So deep down at the heart of it I’m deeply fearful - of irrelevance and of replacement.

I’ve been guilty of it as well - using AI to generate research docs or execute code snippets and only give it a passing glance of a review, declaring it “good enough”, then shipping it out for the world to see (or for my poor colleagues to review). I know it’s not as simple as being lazy, but there’s immense pressure right now to be “AI-first”, to fill up your hands with so many parallel things it’s impossible to review every word. So with that, your work and your craft becomes diluted because there is just so much less attention to go around.

But here’s a ray of hope.

Tomasz Tunguz made a quaint observation recently in his post “Observations on Writing with AI”. “What’s authentic?” he asks. “Imperfection.” AI editors and authors alike all sound the same. Your voice - with its imperfections - make your work uniquely stand out. We can lean into that.

Elsewhere on the internet, I came across Emily Segal’s Substack article on “tasteslop” where she argues that LLMs and the technology operators that own them, are attempting to capture the optimized taste of society. They do this through expert human raters, fine tuned reinforcement learning and real-world internet signals trained on billions of people. But what true taste is is socially constructed and always constructed in opposition to the dominant framework of the time. So by definition - the moment it gets captured by the machine, it ceases to be tasteful.

The evolving preference of human beings in the here and now, working together in sociotechnical systems - is still impossible to capture and distill (though I’m sure some PhD researcher somewhere is working on this as we speak). So here’s to keeping your own identity in the age of AI. Writing things (or typing things) out by hand. Viva la analog, and all things imperfect. It may feel like AI is capturing the world - and accelerating tons of good things - but it cannot come for the soul of the craft. That’s for you and me to own, and keep our voices authentically human in these weird, weird times.