AI Slop or Not

"AI slop" is low-effort AI content published without the human judgment that would have made it worth reading. Determining what is AI generated or not is hard. Detection tools now run on platforms like Substack, and many people believe they can just tell by reading. Both tools and people can be wrong in different ways (false positives & false negatives), and it's the false positives that can cause real harm. Ken Krugler works through eight levels of writing, from making it entirely yourself to shipping what AI wrote untouched, using versions of the same paragraph. He runs a detector (Pangram) on multiple documents, including his own newsletter, where he explains how he got his own results wrong in print. If you use AI to assist with writing/image generation, or you manage people who do, this one's for you.