Like the original Grammarly, I think this can be useful for business writing because these tools help you get to the point. Many students are rewarded for using flowery language in school essays, but if you're composing an email or writing a design doc, just optimize for reading time and clarity.
But for general use, I think this is misguided. The problem with LLM output is not that it's using em dashes or words such as "crucial". It's that most LLM articles on LinkedIn or on personal blogs just take a one-sentence prompt and dress it up into a lot of pointless words, wasting everyone's time: "I had a shower thought and I asked a chatbot to write five pages of text about it." I don't need prettier words, I need there to be far fewer of them?
On the flip side, if you're a human and actually have something of consequence to say, "delve" all you want.
> Always judge an author by the length of their text.
Flashbacks to a past employer where the CEO decided that brevity was a core company value and started rewarding people for short communications and scolding us for longer text.
Over the next year a few charlatans moved up the ranks by spitting out half-baked thoughts and e-mails all the time, which looked like clarity and brevity on the surface. People were afraid to speak out or discuss nuance because it was too many words, and you didn't want to use too many words.
So it’s really about the content; not the metrics.
My mother was British. She was also an awesome cook.
She used to say that the British dining table was the fanciest in the world, with fine china plates, silver silverware, lace tablecloths and matching napkins, etc., but terrible food.
French tables, on the other hand, were casual affairs, with newspaper on the table, and a candle jammed into a wine bottle, but excellent food.
So many books that could've been an article. I try to save myself time by checking Goodreads but it's not always clear as I'm more critical than the average person. Reading a preview in Google Books helps but you only get so many pages before you're cut off. Appreciate that lately new books are sometimes featured in pubs with an excerpt.
What you say makes no sense by your own logic. 200 words can be wonderfully filled with wisdom or devoid of insight depending how much work and experience went into those words. So it is not appropriate to judge an author by the length of their text. You need length/wisdom but you can’t objectively or quickly determine the denominator.
Tangential, but I remember when I was studying for the ACT, there was something in one of the practice books that stuck with me. I'm paraphrasing but it was something like "Good writing is clear and easy to understand. It's about communication, make sure you communicate".
It was something that I guess I logically knew but hadn't fully realized. I had always tried to be fancy with my writing and pad it out to meet minimum word counts, with "understand-ability" being somewhat of an afterthought. Just that one statement in my ACT prep book made me, in my opinion, a significantly better writer.
In a couple of years, the corporative communication will work like this:
You write a bunch of bullet points and feed them to an AI to create a beautiful and well written email. Your reader will feed that email into his own AI and he will generate bullet points to read.
> Many students are rewarded for using flowery language in school essays
Not to nitpick, but I actually had the opposite experience in uni. My prof docked me marks for my flowery language, and honestly, good for her, my lazy writing style honestly sucks (see how I used "honestly" twice in the same sentence, lol).
Not to take away from your post or anything, just realising I got lucky with my prof. I agree that LLMs produce way too much output when generating writing (and code too!)
As a senior engineer I spend a lot of time reviewing and approving technical designs, PRDs etc.
Over the years the amount of basic copy editing I have to do has really grown. I sometimes feel like I’m removing 20%+ of the text. And that was before LLMs.
Flowery language is important but something like BLUF - Bottom Line Upfront[0] is important too.
While it's important for universities to continue to teach the ability to write using 'flowery' language I think that it is also important that schools teach students something like BLUF -- Bottom Line Upfront.[0]
Compare and contrast those two sentences. I'm fine writing a comment that us just the first sentence and the link without a footnote but I know as a message it won't go over well on a site like Hackernews. They looooooove their verbosity here.
So in some situations you have to gussy it up -- give it some of that Emeril "BAM". The deal is that you have to know your audience. The medium is the message.[1] shit like that.
Stuff on Linkedin is full of pointless words because that's what Linkedin is for -- it's about signalling to other people that you can string together a bunch of pointless words that are effusive and vaguely passive aggressive at the same time -- you know, typical business shit.
“Whether in a suit or in a loincloth people are ignorant little thorns cutting into one another. They seem incapable of advancing beyond the violent tendencies which at one time were necessary for survival.”
We can delve into this kinda stuff but really it just comes back to the know your audience and that the medium is the message. Also don't repeat your self.
Removing the aesthetic tells from LLM-generated text won't fix the fact that there's nobody home with opinions and experiences to express. It will just make it take more work for your unsuspecting audience to figure that out.
It seems relevant that a lot of these things were fairly notorious clichés even before LLMs, which just intensified the phenomenon. They were what people tended to do who wanted to sound smart and sophisticated but didn't have a developed voice or anything in particular to say. Indeed, I'm fairly sure this is why LLMs sound like this.
I pasted a blog that I wrote myself and flagged hundreds of patterns. Granted, the article is 15,000 words so some are expected but there are simply too many false positives to make this and any similar tool have any usefulness beyond flagging the most obvious offenders.
And looking at its suggestions, they are not very good. People are better developing their own writing style than trusting generic advice meant for common-denominator writing.
Wow! Did you know that Abraham Lincoln let AI write the Gettysburg Address? 17 patterns identified out of only 305 words. I don't know why I ever let him get the ad revenue.
The rule of three was actually good and common writing advice in the pre-LLM era. There's psychological studies that show 3 is a good number to grab human attention, which is why you have "an Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman walk into a bar" jokes. Even my Algebra professor said that a well-written definition should have three conditions, for example a group is a set with an operation that is (1) associative, (2) has a neutral, and (3) has inverses. I don't think he was completely joking.
(For stories with multiple protagonists, the common choices that seem to work best for readers are 3 or 5. Humans are weird.)
I suspect that LLMs use that rule so much, because it's so common in their training data, for good reasons.
Being cautious and an autistic mathematician also I am prone to heavy qualification. This causes very large blocks of my writing to be highlighted as "Hedge Stack" which isn't really helpful. Lots of Overused Intensifier and Triple Construction instances also, but those are usually words or phrases, not several paragraphs together as with Hedge Stack.
Seems like a sad situation, but I'm not going to start changing my communication style to avoid sounding like an LLM. At least not yet.
I c/p a section of Asimov's "The Last Question", since it was readily on the front page. It detected 14 patterns (2 reds, one yellow, bunch of green and blue) in 583 words. Welp, I guess it's back to school for mr. Asimov...
Update: 13 patterns in 800 words for Samuel Clemens. Apparently he's an em-dash abuser, but also likes "filler adverbs", "triple constructions" and "anaphora abuse". Damn!
And for Mr. Hemingway we have 43 patterns in 1600 words. 16 filler adverbs, 5 triple constructions, 5 staccato bursts, and 14 question then answer. My my...
When I copy/paste some text I wrote online, even short, it's full of alerts. Maybe I write exactly like a LLM in English? It's not my native tongue, maybe that's why.
Otherwise, almost nothing. I don't know if it's because it's specialized on English or if learning it as a second language makes it really unnatural?
I'm curious how well this thing works, but you need a yardstick to measure it against. The last year or two a burgeoning community of meatspace AI detectors has emerged right here on HN, it might be fun for someone to rank "sloppiness" of submitted HN articles as gauged by comment sentiment vs. this tool to see how well they align.
I'm sure there are some useful applications of this but we can't trust the reliability of an AI detector for the same reasons we can't trust the reliability of AI.
This is so dumb. LLMs have some patterns they copied from people, so now people need to stop using those patterns? Not to mention 10000000 famous books, stories, speeches, essays, comments and more are flagged by these stupid tools.
These kinds of tools only narrow the scope of our expression and over time can suffocate the entire written language into a single flavour of corporate approved not-slop speak. Yes AI writing is bad, but sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.
I created a gem on Gemini (the equivalent of a gtp) basically with a set of instructions for rewriting my text in a professional, clear and concise way and it works great.
I just write my text without too much thought about it and I get a rewritten version that is usually clearer, but not pedantic or overly verbose.
It particular helps for English text as it is not my first language
Could you still utilize this tool running a local model (any Ollama model for example) instead of making calls out to Anthropic to avoid costs while running this tool or does it have something specific to Anthropic that requires it?
A whole new generation is coming who learns how to communicate by llm-generated text, so I assume by time these used "catching" methods will be invalidated.
> "In an Era of…" Opening phrase that stalls before reaching the actual argument.
Always gotta have In This AI Era of Ours. Because even if you fail to convince the reader of the point you ostensibly were trying to make you still get to tediously skull-bang about The AI Era. And it only costs tokens.
> Staccato Burst Three or more consecutive very short sentences at matching cadence.
This is real. It’s not your imagination. AI is here and eating your lunch/AI is psychologically draining/The unemployment lines are unusually long.
I've been wanting something like this for a while now but as an extension that runs locally. Just something I can click to get a quick response telling me if the article seems like ai so I can focus on the writing without needing to spend energy on remembering ai styles and detecting obvious ai. I'd be pretty happy to see something like that built straight into firefox.
Ultimately slop is so pervasive that I'm wasting a fair amount of time vetting text and it's affecting my ability to simply enjoy reading. I keep getting part way into an article before realizing it's low quality ai writing. Being able to get a quick heads up that it looks like ai before starting would save me a lot of energy even on articles I decide to try reading because it cuts down on mental overhead.
I find some parallelism between writing articles and Pull requests.
We are moving to a point in time, where we don't care if the PR was written by AI. We care that the author understand what is about, that it tested it and in general, we want the ownership.
With articles is the same. I don't care if it was written by AI, if the content is interesting, and ai make it easier to digest... That's a win win.
The problem is not the presentation. Is the content.
One thing I learned is that AI written text is not hard to spot. Usually, when I meet slop, I close it one or two paragraphs in. Although tools like this will become more common, they usually serve to win an argument, or confirm what you already believe.
Also, it was painful to learn that my very first blog post I wrote in 2013 is AI generated. But I'm fine with it because I read this:
> A short punchy opener (≤10 words) followed by two or more substantially longer elaboration sentences — the LLM "hook then evidence pile" rhythm.
... and realized that the entire app is AI generated.
I read this before but I have some doubts. I recall some companies that
were surprised when suddenly the prices were increased. Usual examples
include Amazon, Google and some more, but this can happen to any company,
including AI slop master companies. I am not at all claiming that the AI
slop has zero use cases, of course - there are use cases, so I don't deny
that. But the assumption generated here by AI slop, claiming how all the
problems will soon have been solved, and risk-free profits are to be made
by all companies, is just rubbish nonsense. AI slop is a big liar. In fact:
I am beginning to believe that the current US administration is an AI slop
brigade. Every time the stock market yields some suspicious profits, it seems
to be that the AI slop protects some thieves here.
The feedback needs to go away or this thing is just exacerbating the problem. Give a slop score if you must but then shut up and let the user interpret the result as they see fit.
Slop is stopped by allowing unique quirks to flourish. Do you speak in 'staccato bursts'? THEN FUCKING WRITE IN STACCATO BURSTS! Do you need a 'throat clearing opener? THEN FUCKING USE ONE!
Human language does not need to take progressive steps toward some universal standard. Having one is fine, in theory, but the beauty lies in how we solve for our inability to consistently utilize it. Adding mechanism to every step removes the beauty. Stop being the problem.
It should loop the LLM’s results back on itself repeatedly, behind the scenes, until its writing is free of signs of slop. After your quality gates pass and the result is presented, it’d be cool to then see a visualization of each of the agent’s drafts that the user can page through to watch how the writing was gradually incrementally improved by the model!
No need to keep a human in the writing-improvement loop. Just show it when it’s slop free.
This is a confused and misguided project. It makes the mistake of failing to identify why the AI 'style' feels wrong. The author decided to replicate similar tools by breaking down AI writing into bite-sized issues, but it just doesn't work the same way as correcting grammatical errors. Because of this, the author had to really try to find what's so wrong about these patterns in isolation, so all of it comes off as annoying nitpicks. Let's take a look at a few.
> Overused Intensifier - Delete it. If the sentence still makes sense, the word was never needed. If it doesn't, rewrite the sentence to show why it matters.
You heard it here first. Adjectives? More like AIdjectives, a covert plan by AI companies to make our writing more sloppy. According to this recommendation, writing should never have any emphasis, it should only contain the most basic "X is Y" relations, like in some programming language. Sentences should contain the bare minimum amount of information required to parse them, everything else must be cut. In practice, this recommendation only filters a few of the most pervasive 'corporate PowerPoint'-style language, but even then, the suggestion that these words are never useful is wrong.
> Triple Construction - Break the pattern. Use two items or four. Or convert one item into its own sentence to give it more weight.
Humans may really like when things are structured into threes, but you must resist this AI temptation! Use two or four points, because you're not like them. The only reason cited for why this is wrong is that LLMs use this pattern often, so naturally the rest of us must cede good writing practices to them.
> "Almost" Hedge - Commit. "Almost always" → "usually." Or just say "always" and defend the claim. Readers notice when you won't take a stance.
As we all know, the world is discrete and easy to describe. That's why there simply isn't anything between things that happen "usually" (70%) and "always" (100%). Saying "almost always" (95%) is bad, because you should round your estimates and defend what is now an obviously wrong statement, for it makes you seem more brutal and confident.
> "Broader Implications" - State the implication explicitly, or cut the phrase. "This has broader implications" says nothing. What are the implications? Say them.
God forbid you organize an essay that's in any way non-linear, temporarily withholding some information for the sake of organization. Asking to can the phrase entirely says that even complex writing should be strung together in a rigid and sequential order.
That's the problem with the project, the way I see it. It was too heavily inspired by Grammarly and the likes, and in chasing it, the criticisms were adapted to fit the Grammarly model. The issue with that LLM 'style' is the punchy, continuous overuse of these patterns to the point where these phrases start seeming like meaningless sound combinations. There's nothing wrong with most of these patterns individually, what I hate is when text is filled with them to the brim, not when they show at all. If your writing is like the example paragraph, with most of the text highlighted, then it's a sign that your essay is more rhetoric than substance. But if you write an argument with three items in it and it's highlighted because "that's like AI" to make you delete it, then that's performative self-censorship, not improving your writing.
160 comments
But for general use, I think this is misguided. The problem with LLM output is not that it's using em dashes or words such as "crucial". It's that most LLM articles on LinkedIn or on personal blogs just take a one-sentence prompt and dress it up into a lot of pointless words, wasting everyone's time: "I had a shower thought and I asked a chatbot to write five pages of text about it." I don't need prettier words, I need there to be far fewer of them?
On the flip side, if you're a human and actually have something of consequence to say, "delve" all you want.
> "I had a shower thought and I asked a chatbot to write five pages of text about it." I don't need prettier words, I need there to be fewer of them?
Always judge an author by the length of their text.
Decades of insights barely condensed into 200 pages? Great! Hours of thought expanded into 200 pages? Very bad.
Same length of text but lands very differently. Same is true for emails, tweets, videos, and even just talking. Say less! But not too little either.
> Always judge an author by the length of their text.
Flashbacks to a past employer where the CEO decided that brevity was a core company value and started rewarding people for short communications and scolding us for longer text.
Over the next year a few charlatans moved up the ranks by spitting out half-baked thoughts and e-mails all the time, which looked like clarity and brevity on the surface. People were afraid to speak out or discuss nuance because it was too many words, and you didn't want to use too many words.
My mother was British. She was also an awesome cook.
She used to say that the British dining table was the fanciest in the world, with fine china plates, silver silverware, lace tablecloths and matching napkins, etc., but terrible food.
French tables, on the other hand, were casual affairs, with newspaper on the table, and a candle jammed into a wine bottle, but excellent food.
It was something that I guess I logically knew but hadn't fully realized. I had always tried to be fancy with my writing and pad it out to meet minimum word counts, with "understand-ability" being somewhat of an afterthought. Just that one statement in my ACT prep book made me, in my opinion, a significantly better writer.
In a couple of years, the corporative communication will work like this:
You write a bunch of bullet points and feed them to an AI to create a beautiful and well written email. Your reader will feed that email into his own AI and he will generate bullet points to read.
> Many students are rewarded for using flowery language in school essays
Not to nitpick, but I actually had the opposite experience in uni. My prof docked me marks for my flowery language, and honestly, good for her, my lazy writing style honestly sucks (see how I used "honestly" twice in the same sentence, lol).
Not to take away from your post or anything, just realising I got lucky with my prof. I agree that LLMs produce way too much output when generating writing (and code too!)
Over the years the amount of basic copy editing I have to do has really grown. I sometimes feel like I’m removing 20%+ of the text. And that was before LLMs.
While it's important for universities to continue to teach the ability to write using 'flowery' language I think that it is also important that schools teach students something like BLUF -- Bottom Line Upfront.[0]
Compare and contrast those two sentences. I'm fine writing a comment that us just the first sentence and the link without a footnote but I know as a message it won't go over well on a site like Hackernews. They looooooove their verbosity here.
So in some situations you have to gussy it up -- give it some of that Emeril "BAM". The deal is that you have to know your audience. The medium is the message.[1] shit like that.
Stuff on Linkedin is full of pointless words because that's what Linkedin is for -- it's about signalling to other people that you can string together a bunch of pointless words that are effusive and vaguely passive aggressive at the same time -- you know, typical business shit.
“Whether in a suit or in a loincloth people are ignorant little thorns cutting into one another. They seem incapable of advancing beyond the violent tendencies which at one time were necessary for survival.”
We can delve into this kinda stuff but really it just comes back to the know your audience and that the medium is the message. Also don't repeat your self.
Definitely don't repeat yourself.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
And looking at its suggestions, they are not very good. People are better developing their own writing style than trusting generic advice meant for common-denominator writing.
(For stories with multiple protagonists, the common choices that seem to work best for readers are 3 or 5. Humans are weird.)
I suspect that LLMs use that rule so much, because it's so common in their training data, for good reasons.
Seems like a sad situation, but I'm not going to start changing my communication style to avoid sounding like an LLM. At least not yet.
Update: 13 patterns in 800 words for Samuel Clemens. Apparently he's an em-dash abuser, but also likes "filler adverbs", "triple constructions" and "anaphora abuse". Damn!
And for Mr. Hemingway we have 43 patterns in 1600 words. 16 filler adverbs, 5 triple constructions, 5 staccato bursts, and 14 question then answer. My my...
https://zjpea.substack.com/p/an-llm-will-never-say-thou
Inputting Japanese sentences of any length flags the whole sentence as "Dramatic Fragment: A standalone paragraph with ≤4 words".
Otherwise, almost nothing. I don't know if it's because it's specialized on English or if learning it as a second language makes it really unnatural?
I just write my text without too much thought about it and I get a rewritten version that is usually clearer, but not pedantic or overly verbose.
It particular helps for English text as it is not my first language
And good to know that Teddy Roosevelt was not an LLM: https://www.trcp.org/2011/01/18/it-is-not-the-critic-who-cou...
> "In an Era of…" Opening phrase that stalls before reaching the actual argument.
Always gotta have In This AI Era of Ours. Because even if you fail to convince the reader of the point you ostensibly were trying to make you still get to tediously skull-bang about The AI Era. And it only costs tokens.
> Staccato Burst Three or more consecutive very short sentences at matching cadence.
This is real. It’s not your imagination. AI is here and eating your lunch/AI is psychologically draining/The unemployment lines are unusually long.
Ultimately slop is so pervasive that I'm wasting a fair amount of time vetting text and it's affecting my ability to simply enjoy reading. I keep getting part way into an article before realizing it's low quality ai writing. Being able to get a quick heads up that it looks like ai before starting would save me a lot of energy even on articles I decide to try reading because it cuts down on mental overhead.
We are moving to a point in time, where we don't care if the PR was written by AI. We care that the author understand what is about, that it tested it and in general, we want the ownership.
With articles is the same. I don't care if it was written by AI, if the content is interesting, and ai make it easier to digest... That's a win win.
The problem is not the presentation. Is the content.
Paste AI generated text and get a more human sounding version? That’s just AI generated text with extra steps.
Also, it was painful to learn that my very first blog post I wrote in 2013 is AI generated. But I'm fine with it because I read this:
> A short punchy opener (≤10 words) followed by two or more substantially longer elaboration sentences — the LLM "hook then evidence pile" rhythm.
... and realized that the entire app is AI generated.
> Companies that utilize these tools will thrive
I read this before but I have some doubts. I recall some companies that were surprised when suddenly the prices were increased. Usual examples include Amazon, Google and some more, but this can happen to any company, including AI slop master companies. I am not at all claiming that the AI slop has zero use cases, of course - there are use cases, so I don't deny that. But the assumption generated here by AI slop, claiming how all the problems will soon have been solved, and risk-free profits are to be made by all companies, is just rubbish nonsense. AI slop is a big liar. In fact: I am beginning to believe that the current US administration is an AI slop brigade. Every time the stock market yields some suspicious profits, it seems to be that the AI slop protects some thieves here.
Yes, I see the message about it staying local. No, I don't trust the message or that you will never be hacked.
Every single article out there is now structured as: - THE problem - THE solution - THE proof - Why it matters
Slop is stopped by allowing unique quirks to flourish. Do you speak in 'staccato bursts'? THEN FUCKING WRITE IN STACCATO BURSTS! Do you need a 'throat clearing opener? THEN FUCKING USE ONE!
Human language does not need to take progressive steps toward some universal standard. Having one is fine, in theory, but the beauty lies in how we solve for our inability to consistently utilize it. Adding mechanism to every step removes the beauty. Stop being the problem.
Until now, ideas were only relevant when the owner was able to communicate then regardless of the impact of the idea.
LLM "democratize"(VC term) sharing ideas, as people with low communication skills can be heard.
It should loop the LLM’s results back on itself repeatedly, behind the scenes, until its writing is free of signs of slop. After your quality gates pass and the result is presented, it’d be cool to then see a visualization of each of the agent’s drafts that the user can page through to watch how the writing was gradually incrementally improved by the model!
No need to keep a human in the writing-improvement loop. Just show it when it’s slop free.
> Slop Cop
Thought this was a NY Post-style headline about FBI "top cop" Kash Patel's drinking problem: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/04/kash-patel-fbi-...
> Overused Intensifier - Delete it. If the sentence still makes sense, the word was never needed. If it doesn't, rewrite the sentence to show why it matters.
You heard it here first. Adjectives? More like AIdjectives, a covert plan by AI companies to make our writing more sloppy. According to this recommendation, writing should never have any emphasis, it should only contain the most basic "X is Y" relations, like in some programming language. Sentences should contain the bare minimum amount of information required to parse them, everything else must be cut. In practice, this recommendation only filters a few of the most pervasive 'corporate PowerPoint'-style language, but even then, the suggestion that these words are never useful is wrong.
> Triple Construction - Break the pattern. Use two items or four. Or convert one item into its own sentence to give it more weight.
Humans may really like when things are structured into threes, but you must resist this AI temptation! Use two or four points, because you're not like them. The only reason cited for why this is wrong is that LLMs use this pattern often, so naturally the rest of us must cede good writing practices to them.
> "Almost" Hedge - Commit. "Almost always" → "usually." Or just say "always" and defend the claim. Readers notice when you won't take a stance.
As we all know, the world is discrete and easy to describe. That's why there simply isn't anything between things that happen "usually" (70%) and "always" (100%). Saying "almost always" (95%) is bad, because you should round your estimates and defend what is now an obviously wrong statement, for it makes you seem more brutal and confident.
> "Broader Implications" - State the implication explicitly, or cut the phrase. "This has broader implications" says nothing. What are the implications? Say them.
God forbid you organize an essay that's in any way non-linear, temporarily withholding some information for the sake of organization. Asking to can the phrase entirely says that even complex writing should be strung together in a rigid and sequential order.
That's the problem with the project, the way I see it. It was too heavily inspired by Grammarly and the likes, and in chasing it, the criticisms were adapted to fit the Grammarly model. The issue with that LLM 'style' is the punchy, continuous overuse of these patterns to the point where these phrases start seeming like meaningless sound combinations. There's nothing wrong with most of these patterns individually, what I hate is when text is filled with them to the brim, not when they show at all. If your writing is like the example paragraph, with most of the text highlighted, then it's a sign that your essay is more rhetoric than substance. But if you write an argument with three items in it and it's highlighted because "that's like AI" to make you delete it, then that's performative self-censorship, not improving your writing.