Allergic to Slop

This post was NOT written by AI. Every character was typed by human fingers on a physical keyboard.

Are you allergic to blogs and LinkedIn posts written by AI? The tics are an easy tell. Not x, but y. It earns its keep. It’s load bearing. The argument has teeth.

I understand why it bothers you, because it bothers me, too. So much so that I have an entire pipeline of Claude skills that turn raw AI prose into something that sounds more human-like. However, the /humanize skill is still not enough to keep my prose from sounding like it was AI generated — for now.

So you demand that you will read what I write by hand. I understand the unfairness. If I were to ask you to read what AI wrote, that breaks an implicit social contract that whatever I write is an honest compression of my thoughts. If it has AI tics, then that’s an immediate signal that I am passing the burden of understanding to you without having done the hard work of compressing it myself. As if I don’t respect your time and attention.

But no amount of trying will convince you that my blog posts are a genuine compression of my thoughts; that engaging with its content will be a more efficient use of your time than having a conversation with me. As soon as the post says: It’s not disrespectful — it’s efficient, I already lost you.

Imagine a near-future where AI models train better on my voice and make it sound more human-written. Will you stop reading everything just becuase it’s on a blog that may contain other AI-generated content? Will you resort to synchronous communication just to make sure that my thoughts are my own, not generated by AI? Would you stick to your principles while others who embrace new reading zoom past you?

Consider this: do you still read research papers from abstract to conclusion, or do you ask your research agent to read them all and give you a summary of how it’s relevant to your work? If you are delegating lexical comprehension, you are already practicing new reading, and you are admitting that whatever you write will also be subject to new reading, too.

There’s nothing wrong with reading cover to cover on any subject, other than you’re missing out on skimming on other adjacent topics. AI agents allow us to choose an arbitrary level of depth of understanding over any number of subjects. The best I can do is to assume that my primary audience is an AI agent.

If you were at a buffet, would you learn more about culinary arts by eating a whole Prime Rib, or a bite of each dish they had to offer? If you were cooking a 12-course meal, would you expect your guests to clean the plate for every dish you cooked?