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/Deslop
- Leynos 8mo agoPlease try and follow this advice, because there's nothing more annoying than some comic book guy wannabe moaning about AI tells while I'm trying to enjoy the discussion.
- Der_Einzige 8mo agoWe wrote the paper on deslopping LLM and their outputs: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061
- tahigichigi 8mo agoWow. We are not worthy. What would you say are the top 2 red flags missing from the piece? Would love to know
- piker 8mo agoJust don't use LLMs to generate text you want other humans to read. Think and then write. If it isn't worth your effort, it certainly isn't worth your audience's.
- fastasucan 8mo agoIt comes down to this for me as well. Just the same way I never open auto generated mails, I see no reason to read text other people have got an LLM to write for them.
- greatgib 8mo agoWhat is nice is that sometimes you will just write very badly what you want to say, like a scenario or badly written sentences, and just ask the LLM to reformulate that to be proper nicely written text. But in that case, there are big chances that the stylistic issues described in the article are present despite you having carefully crafted the content.
- piker 8mo agoNo, the output is normalized garbage. Don't do this. Delete it instead. If it's worth saying, you'll spend the time to edit your original text.
- tahigichigi 8mo agoThe best is when you use a speech to text app like Whispr Flow and just ramble to the AI about an idea or an experience, get your thoughts out and it returns a silhouette of an insight or article. So when people say they never get a good output it's because they're trying to from thought > article instead of thought > exploration > direction > structure > outline > article
- rrherr 8mo agoYes, I've had great results with a similar workflow. I record myself rambling out loud, and import the audio in NotebookLM. Then I use this system prompt in NotebookLM chat: > Write in my style, with my voice, in first person. Answer questions in my own words, using quotes from my recordings. You can combine multiple quotes. Edit the quotes for length and clarity. Fix speech disfluencies and remove fillers. Do not put quotation marks around the quotes. Do not use an ellipsis to indicate omitted words in quotes. Then chat with "yourself." The replies will match your style and will be source-grounded. In fact, the replies automatically get footnotes pointing to specific quotes in your raw transcripts. I also like brainstorming by generating Audio Overviews, Slide Decks, and Reports in NotebookLM. The Audio Overviews don't sound like AI writing. The Slide Decks and Reports do sound like AI writing, if you use the defaults, but you can use custom prompts. This workflow may not save me time, but it helps me get started, or get unstuck. It helps me stop procrastinating and manage my emotions. I consider it assistive technology for ADHD.
- fxwin 8mo ago> The elephant in the room is that we’re all using AI to write but none of us wants to feel like we’re reading AI generated content. My initial reaction to the first half of this sentence was "Uhh, no?", but then i realized it's on substack, so probably more typical for that particular type of writer (writing to post, not writing to be read). I don't even let it write documentation or other technical things anymore because it kept getting small details wrong or injecting meaning in subtle ways that isn't there. The main problem for me aren't even the eye-roll inducing phrases from the article (though they don't help), it's that LMs tend to subtly but meaningfully alter content, causing the effect of the text to be (at best slightly) misaligned with the effect I intended. It's sort of an uncanny valley for text. Along with the problems above, manual writing also serves as a sort of "proof-of-work" establishing credibility and meaning of an article - if you didn't bother taking the time to write it, why should i spend my time reading it?
- idop 8mo agoIndeed. I have never used an LLM to write. And coding agents are terrible at writing documentation, it's just bullet points with no context and unnecessary icons that are impossible to understand. There's no flow to the text, no actual reasoning (only confusing comments about changes made during the development that are absolutely irrelevant to the final work), and yet somehow too long. The elephant in the room is that AI is allowing developers who previously half-assed their work to now quarter-ass it.
- fxwin 8mo agoI have tried using them, both for technical documentation (Think Readme.md) and for more expository material (Think wiki articles), and bounced off of them pretty quickly. They're too verbose and focus on the wrong things for the former, where output is intended to get people up to speed quickly, and suffer from the things i mentioned above for the latter, causing me to have to rewrite a lot, causing more frustration than just writing it myself in the first place. That's without even mentioning the personal advantages you get from distilling notes, structuring and writing things yourself, which you get even if nobody ever reads what you write.
- 8mo ago
- stuaxo 8mo agoThis article itself feels LLM written.
- oytis 8mo agoIt is also an advertisement for a magic prompt to make LLM edit text to look less LLM-y.
- tahigichigi 8mo agoThis anon gets it
- tahigichigi 8mo agothis sentence feels LLM written
- etyhhgfff 8mo agoYour response feels LLM written
- varjag 8mo agoI would also point to a human-generated (and maintained) list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
- tahigichigi 8mo agonot as catchy though is it
- eddyg 8mo agoWhich is also very useful in writing skills to help avoid these kinds of issues. https://github.com/blader/humanizer https://github.com/blader/humanizer
- randomtoast 8mo agoYou just need to use this list as a prompt and instruct the LLM to avoid this kind of slop. If you want to be serious about it, you can even use some of these slop detectors and iterate through a loop until the top three detectors rate your text as "very likely human."
- greatgib 8mo agoI'm surprised that there is not a "skill" for that attached to the article.
- sorobahn 8mo agoThere is a pdf with a deslop prompt at the end of the article. Prob the skill definition you’re looking for.
- tahigichigi 8mo agothere's a downloadable prompt at the bottom that'll kill any slop dead. Will replace with a Notion link to keep it updatable
- cadamsdotcom 8mo agoThere’s a really cool technique Andrew Ng nicknamed reflection, where you take the AI output and feed it back in, asking the model to look at it - reflect on it - in light of some other information. Getting the writing from your model then following up with “here’s what you wrote, here’re some samples of how I wrote, can you redo that to match?” makes its writing much less slop-y.
- tahigichigi 8mo agotone of voice match is similar but different. That's why I made toneofvoice.app AI can copy 90% of your tone of voice but still use em dashes and corrective antithesis. Ideally you'll have both /deslop and /soundlikeme (coming soon)
- mold_aid 8mo agoJust seems like the author could have said "write the damn thing yourself" and been done with it.
- oytis 8mo agoIt will definitely help, but also some people, especially in marketing/sales, were writing like that before LLMs. So you should not only write the thing yourself, but also learn some good writing style.
- AnimalMuppet 8mo agoThis. Back in the day, the Cluetrain Manifesto said that corporate writing sounds "literally inhuman". Human beings don't talk the way corporations do. And people want human connection, not the impersonal touch of a corporation. So learn to write like a human being, not like a corporate drone.
- tahigichigi 8mo agobut if I did you wouldn't be writing about it
- mold_aid 8mo agowow mea culpa I guess
- throawayonthe 8mo agoAs they say, "Bait used to be believable."
- tahigichigi 8mo agowhat's unbelievable about it?
- svilen_dobrev 8mo agoso... anyone who's not native english, reading all these overpuffed texts, is cooked? The nuances are most times lost on me And even if the style is (or isn't) LLM'ish, it does not say/help if the (even-filtered) content makes sense / is correct or is BS Style does matter, sure.. https://hbr.org/1982/05/what-do-you-mean-you-dont-like-my-style https://hbr.org/1982/05/what-do-you-mean-you-dont-like-my-st...
- happytoexplain 8mo ago>The elephant in the room is that we’re all using AI to write This makes me sick.