AI Slop and Evidence about Evidence: Why Philosophy Journals Should Reject AI-Written Prose

I don't want to read your AI-generated email. Lots of reasons why, but here's the core of it: I want the text to reflect your thoughts. I want to know that you, the human, actually had those ideas and had them authentically enough to express them in exactly the form I see on the page. For personal emails, I want this for personal reasons. For philosophically substantive emails, I want this for evidential reasons. Philosophy journals should also want human-generated rather than AI-generated text for the same evidential reasons. There Probably Are Good Reasons You Phrased It the Way You Did The evidential reason: Human experts think differently and better than LLMs. Their word choices, even subtle ones, reflect sensitivities that they might not themselves be aware of. Typically, an expert's prose will be more sensitive to the matters on which they are expert than the output of a language model. When I receive a philosophical email from you -- and more so when I read a journal article --…