A post of mine turned out to be very popular last week in Slovenia. Sure it had a fun hook (we are not allowed to sell a book), but I think it also helped that I was incredibly sloppy with it – I wrote it in a hurry with complete disregard for good form, attached two out-of-focus images and hit publish.
Now, I am notorious for not using any capitalisation, so nobody expects anything better from me anyway. Part of my audience was trained on it for almost two decades now, because I believe that this is the one thing that computers can do for me and I refuse to even try anymore, patiently waiting for technology to catch up. i’ve been asking AI to proofread my posts partly for this reason.
Side effects this year were twofold:
a) AI fixed a bunch of other things as well, including changing sentence and post structures
b) I realised that it works just fine if I give it bullet points instead of complete articles
Soon enough my posts looked like most other AI slop, which was an interesting experience. I will try to be better again in the future, writing complete posts and allowing only light proofreading. This week’s posts are an example. I think they are more boring, less attractive, will have smaller reach but those readers will appreciate the human touch.
Now to the punchline – AI doesn’t know how to be sloppy, it produces over polished, it tries too hard. Humans are lazy, AI is not. Humans will try to get away with minimum needed to convey the message, which gives birth to all kinds of things, including humour. LLM will happily try harder to explain.
AI slop isn’t sloppy enough.
We need more sloppiness, less slop.
I expect that next big trend on UGC will be really ugly and sloppy posts. And yes sure people will try to prompt their Claudes to be sloppy as well, which will be very funny to observe. I bet this is gonna be hard and inconsistent.
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