Adversary · Paper 02 · 12 min
The slop signature
Learn to see AI-generic at a glance: symmetrical feature lists, hollow verbs, unearned 'seamless', ideas with no embarrassing minute.
Slop is not bad grammar. Slop is consensus with a coat of confidence. It has no specific person, no specific minute, no price.
Thesis
Why this paper exists
If you cannot detect slop, you will ship it with your name on it. Judges can detect it even when they cannot name it. They call it a feeling.
- Name five tells of slop in product language
- Rewrite a slop sentence until a body is in it
- Refuse outputs that have no embarrassing minute
The tells
Hollow verbs: unlock, empower, seamlessly, reimagine, leverage. Symmetry: three pillars, four features, five benefits, all the same length. No proper nouns. No times of day. No prices. No one who will be blamed. A problem statement that could be copied onto a different industry with two search-replaces.
Technical slop: six services for a form, a vector database for twenty rows, an agent where a button would do. The intern loves architecture because architecture is how the internet talks about importance.
Put a body in it
Take 'we help nurses communicate better across shifts'. Put a body in it. 'At 19:40 the night nurse takes the keys. She is scared of missing the last insulin. The card has three lines. If it has a fourth, she will not read it.'
If you cannot put a body, a minute, and a fear into the sentence, you do not have a product. You have a press release the intern could have written for anyone.
Judges smell it
They will not say 'this is slop'. They will say 'I've seen this' or 'what's the actual thing' or they will go dead behind the eyes. Your job is to make it impossible to use those sentences on you.
Practice: generate five taglines with a model. Keep the two a human could have written after a shift. Kill the rest without grief.
Drill
Paste a paragraph of your own writing. Strike every hollow verb and every sentence without a person, a minute, or a price. Rewrite. If nothing remains, the idea was weather.
Knowledge check