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Carrion Luggage #1104784 added December 31, 2025 at 8:56am
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Slopportunistic
Let's wrap up the Gregorian calendar year with what may or may not be an AI-generated or -assisted article from Gizmodo.
Slop may be seeping into the nooks and crannies of our brains.
Let me tell you, whoever first called "AI" output "slop" should be outed as the most influential person of the decade. Sadly, it wasn't me, this time.
If you think of something to say and say it, that could never be AI slop, right? In theory, all organically grown utterances and snippets of text are safe from that label.
Welllll... philosophically, do you really know you're not artificial? I mean, really, really know? There are a whole lot of "this is all a simulation" folks out there, some of whom may or may not be bots, but if they're right (which they probably aren't, but no one can prove it either way), then you're just as much AI as your friendly neighborhood LLM. Just, maybe, a little more advanced. Or maybe not. I can point to a few supposedly organic biological human beings who make less sense than chatbots. Flat-earthers, for example.
But our shared linguistic ecosystem may be so AI-saturated, we now all sound like AI.
For variant values of "we" and "all," okay.
Worse, in some cases AI-infected speech is being spouted by (ostensibly human) elected officials.
Well, those are all alien lizard people anyway.
Back in July of this year, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development’s Center for Adaptive Rationality released a paper on this topic titled “Empirical evidence of Large Language Model’s influence on human spoken communication.”
Today (or, rather, when I first saved this article earlier this month) I learned that there's a Center for Adaptive Rationality, and that it's named after someone better known for defining the absolute lower limit on the amount of size and time that can be meaningfully measured. There's a metaphor in there, somewhere, or at least a pun, but I haven't quite teased it out, yet. Something about human rationality being measured in Planck lengths. Most people wouldn't get the joke, anyway.
As Gizmodo noted at the time, it quantified YouTube users’ adoption of words like “underscore,” “comprehend,” “bolster,” “boast,” “swift,” “inquiry,” and “meticulous.”
And? All that shows is that some tubers' scripts may have been generated or assisted by AI.
That exercise unearthed a plausible—but hardly conclusive—link between changes to people’s spoken vocabularies over the 18 months following the release of ChatGPT and their exposure to the chatbot.
See that? That double emdash in that quote right there? That's also a hallmark of LLM output. There is absolutely nothing wrong with using emdashes—I do it from time to time, myself, and have been long before this latest crop of generative language models. But now, thanks to LLMs, you can't use one without being accused of AI use. Unfortunately, I fear the same is going to happen to semicolons; those few of us who know how to use them correctly are going to be scrutinized, too.
But two new, more anecdotal reports, suggest that our chatbot dialect isn’t just something that can be found through close analysis of data. It might be an obvious, every day fact of life now.
I must underscore that these are, indeed, anecdotes. Which can bolster understanding, but fall short of the meticulous standards needed for science. Many people don't comprehend that scientific inquiry requires more than just stories, though people are more swift to relate to stories than to dry data. That's why many science articles boast anecdotes in their ledes—to hook the reader, draw them in before getting to the dry stuff.
I really, really, hope you see what I did there.
Anyway, the money quote, for me, is this one:
As “Cassie” an r/AmItheAsshole moderator who only gave Wired her first name put it, “AI is trained off people, and people copy what they see other people doing.” In other words, Cassie said, “People become more like AI, and AI becomes more like people.”
You humans—er, I mean, we humans tend to hold our intelligence in high regard, for inexplicable reasons. It's right there in the official label we slapped on ourselves: homo sapiens, where "homo" isn't some derogatory slur, but simply means "human." The Latin root was more like "man," and also gave French the word "homme," and Spanish "hombre," which mean adult male human, and we can argue about the masculine being the default, as in "all men are created equal," though I agree that usage is antiquated now and that we should strive to be more inclusive in language. The important part of that binomial for this discussion, though, is "sapiens," which can mean "wise" or "intelligent," which we can also argue isn't the same thing (it certainly is not in D&D).
But I've noted in the past that our so-called creative process relies primarily on soaking up past inputs—experiences, words, mannerisms, styles, etc.—and rearranging them in ways that make sense to us and, sometimes, if we're lucky, also to someone else. Consequently, it should shock or surprise no one that we're aping the output of LLMs. I've done it consciously in this entry, but I have undoubtedly done it unconsciously, as well.
We can assert that this is the difference: consciousness. The problem with that assertion is that no one understands what consciousness actually is. I'm convinced I'm conscious (cogito ergo sum), but am I, really, or am I just channeling the parts of Descartes' philosophy that I agree with? And as for the rest of you, I can never truly be sure, though it's safest to assume that you are.
We're all regurgitative entities, to put it more simply (though with an adjective I apparently just made up). Everything we think, say, do, or create is a remix of what the people before us have thought, said, did, created, etc.
Despite my stylistic choices here, I did not use AI or LLMs to write anything in this entry, or for that matter any other entry, ever. The image in the header is, of course, AI-generated, but not the text. Never the text, not without disclosure. You might not believe that, and there's not much I can do about it if that's the case. But it's true. Still, the influence of LLMs is apparent, is it not? At the very least, without them, I would never have had occasion to write this entry. |
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