Legibility of Care, Not Effort

Some of my oldest habits as a human creator have become markers of AI slop. Example one: I love the em dash. I use it all the time. But for some reason LLMs, especially early chat models, developed a conspicuous fondness for the em dash—often in places where I would use an ellipsis or a colon—and suddenly thousands of my farm-to-table human-written words began setting off self-appointed “AI slop detectors.” I sometimes find myself changing punctuation not because it improves the prose but because it improves the signal of the prose: it helps people understand that a human wrote it. Example one point five: Some readers have similarly learned that LLMs seem to lean toward long, syntactically complex sentences—presumably excepting the LinkedIn posts that try to manufacture profundity with line breaks. My teachers from about fourth grade onward had the same comment about me. Example two: VerseNotes, the website I started in 2018, has an off-white background intended to be reminiscent of…