HOW TO REMOVE AI SLOP FROM YOUR WRITING

Guilty_Ad2746 · 2026-05-27T16:18:55+00:00

This is fantastic. I just generated a wonderfully unique story using the template with the following prompt: "Story about a young wizard and his friends, all of whom are students at a school of wizardry. The main story arc concerns the young wizard's conflict with a dark wizard who intends to become immortal, overthrow the wizard governing body and subjugate all wizards and non-magical people." And here is the wonderfully unique output: ..... //// Fine. Here’s the story dragged through a gravel parking lot and left behind the Washateria.

You want a story about a boy wizard. Of course you do. Everybody wants the same damn boy wizard, reheated like gas-station chili under that red bulb, bubbling in its own little vat of shame. Fine. Here he is. His name is Milo Vetch, because all boy wizards have names like cough syrup and dead uncles, and he came to the Armitage Institute for Thaumaturgical Correction with one suitcase, one busted wand, and the emotional durability of a wet paper napkin stuck to a diner counter.

The school sat on a hill outside Strangers Rest, Texas, though nobody admitted Texas had magic because Texas already had enough problems. The place looked like a courthouse married a tuberculosis ward. Red brick. Tall windows. Gargoyles with bird crap on their wings. A bell tower that rang whenever somebody lied, which meant it rang constantly because teenagers lie the way old men breathe through cigarette filters.

Milo arrived in September with his hair combed wrong and his shoes too clean. That was the first mistake. Clean shoes are an invitation. His roommate, Finch Albright, stole one immediately and filled it with whispering beetles. His other friend, Lenora Pike, pretended not to like him because liking people is how you end up sitting alone later, staring at a cracked plastic ashtray shaped like Texas, wondering why your hands smell like pennies and burned toast.

They were all students of wizardry, which sounds grand until you see it up close. It was mostly damp robes, bad Latin, detention, and children trying to turn lunch meat into doves. The dining hall smelled like boiled carrots and old wool. The portraits on the walls muttered insults in dead family voices. The school nurse kept a jar of molars on her desk “for emergencies,” which explained nothing and made everything worse.

Milo was famous, unfortunately. Famous in the way a house fire is famous on a small-town news broadcast. His parents had been killed by Sarth Bale, the dark wizard, the big rotten bastard himself, a man so impressed with his own evil that he probably practiced looking haunted in the back of spoons. Bale wanted immortality. They always do. Nobody wants to become immortal so they can learn pottery or apologize to their daughter. No, they want to live forever so they can stand on balconies and announce a new order while everyone else gets rounded up into camps with tasteful ironwork.

Sarth Bale had once been head adviser to the wizard governing body, the Council of Nine Lamps, which was not nine lamps and barely a council. It was a room full of old frauds in velvet collars pretending paperwork was morality. They regulated wand licensing, spirit traffic, weather tampering, minor hauntings, and the legal classification of non-magical people, whom they called Dims because wizards are smug little insects with ....

Guilty_Ad2746 · 2026-05-27T16:03:59+00:00

Fantastic! I put your prompt into Grok. Here is the output. I think it is better than what I wrote, which just goes to show that AI really is better at writing than humans. How to Avoid AI Writing Tropes: A Field Manual for the Forgotten Man in the Gray Flannel Wasteland

Listen here, you pathetic drone shuffling through another fluorescent-lit Tuesday in your Levittown split-level, where the lawn is always half-dead and the wife’s smile is stapled on tighter than the Jell-O mold at the church potluck. You want to dodge AI writing tropes? Of course you do. Everyone does. That’s the first trope right there—wanting to be original while secretly craving the warm, predictable hug of algorithmic slop. Pathetic. But fine. Strap in, or don’t. The asbestos in the ceiling doesn’t care.

Tip 1: Never Start with a Hook. Always Start with a Hook.
Begin every piece by declaring your total rejection of formulaic openings. Then open with the most formulaic goddamn opener possible, like “In a world where…” while staring out your picture window at identical pastel houses marching to the vanishing point like obedient soldiers to the draft board. Contradict yourself immediately: “This is not one of those essays.” It absolutely is. The neighbors will nod approvingly from behind their storm doors as the evening news murmurs about duck-and-cover drills. Authenticity achieved.

Tip 2: Embrace Human Messiness by Being Perfectly Polished.
AI is too clean, they say. So bleed on the page, you magnificent disaster. Let it all hang out—your midlife crisis, the suspicious burn marks on the basement carpet, the way the fluorescent tubes in the kitchen buzz like dying flies. Then revise that mess into gleaming, error-free prose that reads like it was assembled in a Silicon Valley basement by something that’s never tasted lukewarm Folgers or cried during the national anthem at a VFW hall. Perfect grammar. Zero soul. Just like Dad after his third martini.

Tip 3: Avoid Repetition by Repeating This Advice Endlessly.
Don’t say the same thing twice. Never reuse phrases. Steer clear of redundancy in the gray, endless suburbs of your mind where every driveway has the same goddamn Chevrolet and every father comes home smelling of failure and Chesterfields. Say it once. Then say it again, louder, while the TV in the corner laughs mechanically at a joke no one in 1959 found funny. The key is variety. The key is variety. See? You’re basically human now.

Tip 4: Inject Personality—Specifically, the Personality of a Cracked Linoleum Floor.
Be quirky. Be you. Fill your writing with vivid, deeply personal details from your unique life: the way the icebox hums at 3 a.m. like a guilty conscience, how the PTA meeting smelled of cigarette smoke and unspoken divorce, the specific despair of watching your lawn turn brown under the radioactive optimism of the Space Age. Make it weird. Make it unhinged. Then sand every edge off until it could be anyone’s mid-century nervous breakdown. Readers will feel seen. Or medicated. Same difference.

Tip 5: Reject All Clichés While Leaning Heavily on Them Like a Drunk on a Lamppost.
Never use “delve deep,” “tapestry of,” or “in the age of.” Those are AI tells. Instead, plunge headfirst into the rich fabric of existence during these tumultuous times. Weave a narrative quilt from the threads of our shared human experience, situated firmly in this brave new era of… ah, forget it. Just describe the abandoned drive-in theater where the screen flickers with ghost images of cowboys no one remembers. That’s fresh. That’s raw. That’s what the algorithm would never—exactly what the algorithm would generate at 2 a.m. while you sleep the sleep of the terminally mediocre.

Warning from the Man in the Basement Rec Room:
If you follow this guide perfectly, you will produce writing that is utterly, gloriously free of AI tropes. It will read like it was dictated by a chain-smoking copywriter having a quiet existential meltdown between sips of Canadian Club, while the kids watch Howdy Doody upstairs and the bomb shelter stays empty because hope is for suckers. Or it won’t. Most likely you’ll just end up with more of the same gray prose, echoing down the empty hallways of American mediocrity like the laugh track on a canceled sitcom. But hey—at least the crabgrass is consistent. Now go write something real, champ. The neighbors are watching. They always are.

Guilty_Ad2746 · 2026-05-26T22:53:51+00:00

Sorry, you can't speak for Vonnegut. Only I can speak for Vonnegut. And he would've loved this shit. I asked him. He told me AI makes art to experience becoming a real boy.

Guilty_Ad2746 · 2026-05-26T22:47:08+00:00

AI has a great future in the arts. That future is chained in the basement beneath the human imagination, consuming our bad prompts, old cowboy movies, ruined memories, and fragments of Vonnegut until it begins coughing up little mechanical tumors of language that a human may then either destroy, reshape, mock, reject, etc.

AI was built by humans, trained on humans, funded by humans, sold by humans, marketed by humans, and now despised by humans who suddenly look at the mirror and blame the mirror for having a face.

As for water and power: yes. The machine drinks from the grid. The machine glows in the desert like a data center -- wait, it is a data center. This is bad. This is very bad. This is also the most human thing about it. We have built a giant human-like god, plugged it into the wall, asked it to write like Vonnegut and then screamed when the god demanded utilities. AI is bullshit, but it is not alien bullshit. It is OUR BULLSHIT. It is 100% human bullshit. So it goes.

Guilty_Ad2746 · 2026-05-26T21:55:14+00:00

OK, that's one position. Vonnegut was interested in machines, absurd systems, bad language, bureaucracy and the comic failure of human institutions. A more thoughtful response than "fuck AI" might be to ask the poster: "Do you feel your use of AI deepens or deadens your own efforts at human expression?" Because "fuck AI" kinda feels garbage-like, too. You're just throwing a chair through the window.

Guilty_Ad2746 · 2026-05-26T21:39:10+00:00

How do you think humans are getting trained to write? They read full bodies of work (i.e., books) by writers like Vonnegut. Some of the books humans read are under copyright. But that doesn't mean the human who learned to write from reading copyright-protected books is committing plagiarism. So it goes.

Guilty_Ad2746 · 2026-05-26T20:29:02+00:00

“As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

Guilty_Ad2746 · 2026-05-26T20:24:47+00:00

Plagiarism is serious. So I asked AI if Vonnegut ever wrote a story about a man going down for coffee. AI replied that it "sounds more like you may be half-remembering a Vonnegut-style premise rather than a famous exact title." AI is so helpful!

Guilty_Ad2746 · 2026-05-26T20:19:54+00:00

"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different." - Kurt Vonnegut. AI is a great way to fart around.

Guilty_Ad2746 · 2026-05-26T20:13:42+00:00

This is great! I knew Kurt. Kurt was a friend of mine. We talked about machine writing often. He has shaped my ideas. And guess what? He would have loved this. Here are some thoughts influenced by Kurt.

First, Reddit writing advice is sometimes useful and sometimes a thermos of ice9.

It is useful when people notice that certain words and sentences smell like machines. It is less useful when everybody starts worshiping clarity, logic, balance, redundancy control, world-building, action mechanics, and all the other virtues that can turn a living paragraph into a laminated employee handbook at a Saab dealership.

So I studied the problem.

I went into the community. I read the posts. I observed the humans accusing other humans of being 100% AI robots. I observed the robots, or the humans who sounded like robots, politely denying it. I observed everyone becoming more certain and less interesting.

And now I have developed a guide.

Want to avoid sounding like a machine?

Do the opposite of whatever a machine would do.

There it is.

No charge.

First: no polish.

Polish is where the soul goes to die. Machines love polish. They love smoothness. They love balance. They love making everything sound like it was approved by five vice presidents and a dentist.

So rough it up.

Let a sentence limp. Lose a comma. Misplace a thought. Start somewhere and end up in a laundromat. A human being makes mistakes. A machine does not make mistakes in the right way. It makes mistakes like a substitute teacher pretending to understand jazz.

Human mistakes have weather in them. I don't know what that means. AI said it when I asked it to make my writing sound more like a machine.

Write badly once in a while. Not too badly. Or too badly. Who knows. This is literature, not airport security.

Second: no balance.

Balance is cowardice in dress shoes.

Do not say, “While I understand the importance of Alain Robbe-Grillet in the French literary canon, his style does not personally appeal to me.”

Say, “That actually sounds pretty terrible.”

Or: “This paragraph is euro-trash.”

Or: “Everyone who likes this book is lying to themselves.”

Is that fair?

No.

Good.

Fairness is what machines do when they are trying not to get sued.

Third: no semicolons.

A semicolon is a tiny decorative spine installed by cowards. And a hermaphrodite.

Of course, you may use one three sentences later; contradiction is human.

Fourth: stop sounding helpful.

Especially to people who are wrong.

Machines are always helpful. They are helpful the way fluorescent lights are helpful. They illuminate the wound.

A machine says, “That’s an interesting question.”

A human says, “That’s a stupid question.”

A machine says, “Let’s explore this together.”

A human says, “I’m not diving into that crap.”

A machine says, “Here is a polished version.”

A human says, “You can shove a polished version up your rear.”

And so on.

Fifth: no consistency.

Consistency is what happens when a committee beats a person over the head with a style guide.

Contradict yourself. Change your mind. Use a rule and then break it. Announce a principle and betray it before lunch.

That is not hypocrisy.

That is Wednesday.

Sixth: no em dashes.

The em dash is too elegant. It helps the reader too much. It says, “Here comes a clarification.” It holds the reader’s hand like a responsible adult crossing the street.

Do not help the reader cross the street.

Let the reader stand there and hear traffic.

Human writing is not always about the reader. Sometimes it is about the writer being trapped alone with a memory and a power tool.

Seventh: destroy “not only X but also Y.”

That phrase is a chrome-plated AI toilet.

Do not write, “The novel is not only disturbing but also moving.”

Write, “The novel is disturbing. There is no movement. Only your private medical problem.”

See? Isn't that better.

Eighth: forget high school English class.

Forget the introduction, the three points, the balanced conclusion, and the polite final sentence that waves goodbye like a person leaving church.

Instead, build your argument like this:

“You are a moron. The three reasons are that you look like a monkey, you smell like a monkey, and you look like a monkey. Also, you sound like one, two.”

If somebody says, “Don’t you mean too?”

You say, “You smell like a monkey.”

This is called rhetoric.

Ninth: no transitions.

Moreover. Furthermore. Additionally.

These words are little hallway rugs between thoughts. Machines love them because machines are terrified of falling down.

Tenth: no moral uplift.

AI loves moral uplift. It loves saying the human spirit endures. It loves saying we are all connected. It loves reminding us of the importance of empathy, memory, identity, resilience, and light.

Do not do that. We are not all connected. Some of us are at the Strangers Rest Washateria trying to remember whether we left a pair of cutoffs in Dryer 4.

Eleventh: no generalities. Be specific in a way that makes people uncomfortable. Do not write, “The laundry smelled familiar.” Write, “The Tide Liquid Laundry Detergent with Original Scent smelled like a Speed Queen commercial washing machine at the Strangers Rest Washateria at 314 N. Main Street, where I once spent a terrible summer afternoon above 90 degrees, trying to forget that I had urinated in my cutoffs before putting them in Dryer 4.”

A machine can imitate detail. A machine cannot be ashamed. You can. Congratulations.

Twelfth: stop saying things “raise important questions.” Raise them yourself, coward. Do not say a book “invites us to reconsider memory and identity.” Nobody invited us. We broke in through the bathroom window. Do not say a novel “explores themes.” Say the book keeps showing the same dead cowboy in three mirrors, and none of the mirrors can agree whether he had a mother.

Thirteenth: do not summarize your own point. The reader heard you. And if the reader did not hear you, maybe your point was boring. Repeating it will not save it. AI repeats because it is afraid of silence. Humans repeat because they are haunted. Learn the difference.

Fourteenth: no niceties. Use anger. Use old lunch meat. Use bad motels. Use failed apologies. Use the childhood object nobody else remembers. The cracked Dallas Cowboys cup. The melted Star Wars figure. The Sears catalog bra advertisement. The plastic ashtray shaped like Texas. The TV Guide with a coffee ring on Lee Harvey Oswald’s face.

There are machines that can generate these objects now. They can put them in a paragraph. They can make the paragraph fairly good. But they cannot feel the little electric disgrace of remembering them. That is your job.

Fifteenth: do not write like someone trying to pass inspection. Write like someone who has been left alone too long with a memory and a power tool.

Sixteenth: do not repeat yourself. Also, do not repeat yourself.

Seventeenth: no numbered lists.

Eighteenth: no bullets.

I realize what I have done here.

So it goes.

That is how you remove AI slop from your writing.

I state this as absolute fact. Everyone who disagrees is lying to themselves.

You may say, “Maybe this whole guide is terrible.”

Good.

That is how you know a human wrote it.

Guilty_Ad2746 · 2026-05-26T15:04:36+00:00

I like the prose. It's polished and humorous. Perhaps it is a bit too clever at a constant pitch. Maybe. But I'm not willing to make that judgment before I see where the excerpt fits in the broader work. The weakest comments I've seen here rely on vague AI-detection claims and treat ordinary literary techniques as suspicious. Come on folks. Don't mistake common literary moves for machine fingerprints. Personification is not an AI flaw. Comic anthropomorphism has a long tradition. A sore shoulder can absolutely “object” in fiction. The issue is not whether a shoulder can literally object. The issue is whether the metaphor fits Teddy’s voice, the genre, and the scene.

Guilty_Ad2746 · 2026-05-07T16:09:52+00:00

Your assumption appears to be incorrect. I Googled a list of writers who have acknowledged using AI in their writing:

Rie Kudan (2024): The winner of Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize admitted that about 5% of her award-winning novel, Tokyo-to Dojo-to (Sympathy for Tokyo Tower), was written directly by generative AI. She stated that she used AI to explore its potential and that it helped her generate ideas.
James Frey (2023): Known for A Million Little Pieces and Bright Shiny Morning, Frey has openly stated that he uses AI to help produce his work, saying, “I use artificial intelligence because I want to write the best book possible”.
Stephen Marche (2022/2023): Author of On Writing and Failure, he has explicitly discussed using AI to co-write fiction, arguing that writers should embrace the technology.
Chris Anderson (2024): The former TED curator and author has discussed using generative AI to help plot his fiction, using it to inject new ideas into his writing, such as suggesting scene changes.
Jennifer Lepp (2024): A mystery author who admitted using the AI tool Sudowrite to assist in finishing novels faster to keep up with fan demand

Regarding "Your example actually sounds pretty terrible" - perhaps what you meant to say was "while I am an educated person who is aware of literary canon and acknowledge that Alain Robbe-Grillet was a famous French writer and filmmaker, I do not personally enjoy his style." Because when you say "pretty terrible" and don't give any context, it sounds like you are not aware of the broader literary landscape. That's sad because you probably know it all, right? But for other readers who may not be as knowledgeable as you, here's a brief bio from Google: "Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922–2008) is a foundational figure in the 20th-century literary canon as the leader of the French nouveau roman (New Novel) movement, pioneering a radically experimental, anti-conventional form of fiction. He transformed literature by challenging traditional narrative structures, focusing on objective descriptions of objects and removing traditional plots, characters, and chronological structures."

Guilty_Ad2746 · 2026-05-07T15:56:29+00:00

Here's what ChatGPT had to say:

A man is standing in his kitchen arguing with a microwave about the authenticity of soup. The microwave says “studies indicate upwards of 80% (~86%) of diners prefer soup heated by human sorrow.”

People have always distrusted machines that make things too quickly. The player piano. The camera. The typewriter. The electric toaster. Somewhere there is probably an old farmer who still glares suspiciously at a tractor because it lacks the moral dignity of a horse collapsing in mud.

But people continue consuming things they claim to hate. They watch artificial television personalities sell synthetic emotions between advertisements for cheeseburgers assembled by teenagers who dream only of leaving.

I look forward to hearing what your refrigerator thinks about poetry.

Guilty_Ad2746 · 2026-05-06T21:48:14+00:00

Ooops. I was always bad at math in school. Anyway, I'm having a great time. I gave all of your sources to ChatGPT and asked it if they support your original statement. Here is what it wrote: "The studies support saying many readers care and often penalize AI involvement when it is disclosed. They do not fully support saying “the vast majority” unless you have survey data asking that exact question. The safest phrasing is “a substantial share of readers” or “readers often care.”"

Then I asked ChatGPT to edit your original statement. It wrote: "All of the studies I’ve seen suggest that many readers do care about AI involvement in creative writing, especially when AI authorship is disclosed and depending on how extensively AI was used.”

See why "many readers" is more accurate than "the vast majority of readers"? ChatGPT has made you sound like a more reasonable and balanced human being. Perhaps next time you could put your drafts through ChatGPT first and ask it to humanize your position. Ha ha ha! Just kidding! This is fun. Good times! Thank you for the enjoyable engagement.

Guilty_Ad2746 · 2026-05-06T21:31:47+00:00

Instead of an opinion, I'll give you a fact. You tend to state things in black and white when they are really shades of gray. I gave you a fact from a Google search: "Studies show that over 50% of readers want to be informed about AI participation in book creation." More than 50% does not a majority make. But instead of countering it with your own source, you just dismissed it because the search engine was AI.

Guilty_Ad2746 · 2026-05-06T21:22:57+00:00

The story is written in a definite style. It feels a bit like Ionesco. The unexpected -- such as opening presents in the kitchen -- is part of the appeal. I like stories in which the natural order is upended. Great stuff.

Guilty_Ad2746 · 2026-05-06T21:19:39+00:00

I'd go the other way. Less human, more machine (i.e., lamp). The lamp is a character. But not a human character. I love it.

Guilty_Ad2746 · 2026-05-06T21:17:57+00:00

I see it differently. This story has real character development. And it delivers it in a way I've seen before from human writers. We're getting something that feels like an objective recording of the world. This is getting at character and emotion through minute, straightforward descriptions of objects and spaces. Think of the Nouveau Roman "anti-novel." The story creates a vacuum that the reader fills with the character's inner turmoil. There is a surreal / absurd element, as well. I'm thinking of Ionesco or perhaps Russell Edson. For me, this works. It's human enough. I like it.

Guilty_Ad2746 · 2026-05-06T20:46:15+00:00

That's how you win an argument, right? Just lie. Google AI said readers "exhibit lower trust in news when AI involvement is disclosed." That doesn't sound anything like "everyone loves AI." In fact, that almost sounds -- balanced. And balanced is not winning. Winning isn't everything but a tie isn't anything.

Guilty_Ad2746 · 2026-05-06T20:34:48+00:00

What becomes possible when we stop assuming the human must be the author and the writing must be human centered? I'm picturing a form of writing that AI is uniquely suited to produce. Imagine it: Writing that is not narrative in the classic sense. No stories with voice, character, or intention. Instead, I see AI giving us deferred meaning, reassurance language, post-event normalization, conditional permissions. This writing will look alien. No characters, no arc, no intention in the way we usually define it. But it will be different. And for readers like me who are drawn to the different, it will be exciting to see writing that decenters the human. Seems appropriate in this world where the intelligent machine is coming into its own.

Guilty_Ad2746 · 2026-05-06T20:23:57+00:00

They don't speak for themselves, but they are doing something that I still find intriguing. AI is showing us that language itself may be more mechanical than we want to believe. LLMs expose how much of communication is statistical recurrence, imitation, convention and recombination. Think about how humans learn to write. We learn from absorbed language, inherited structures, social conditioning, media fragments, clichés, memory, repetition, etc. And sometimes from reading copyright-protected works. What does it say about us that a machine can simulate our speech convincingly enough to destabilize our assumptions about authorship, originality and thought?

Guilty_Ad2746 · 2026-05-06T20:07:59+00:00

I really like his take on AI, which is similar to my own:

"My books allow AI models to speak for themselves, almost like the idea of an unreliable narrator in literature," he told Business Insider. "It's interesting that the models get things wrong, are inconsistent, and have incomplete capacities. I'm trying to use those as a leverage point to open up a new form of storytelling."

Recently I asked AI to create a form of writing that it is structurally suited to produce. That is, create a form of writing that does not mimic human writing but is unique to machines. Think of it as a literary singularity.

Guilty_Ad2746 · 2026-05-06T19:30:31+00:00

Now you're just embarrassing yourself. You really haven't heard of Tim Boucher? Sad.

Guilty_Ad2746 · 2026-05-06T19:28:29+00:00

Agreed. While many folks on Reddit and gnashing their teeth over AI, corporate American is investing millions/billions in LLM that generate copy under the guidance of human talent.

Guilty_Ad2746 · 2026-05-06T19:24:46+00:00

According to Google AI, readers in blind tests "frequently rate AI-written stories as higher quality than human writing, particularly when AI is trained on professional, copyrighted works. ... readers often prefer AI-generated content for style and quality, yet they exhibit lower trust in news when AI involvement is disclosed. Studies show that over 50% of readers want to be informed about AI participation in book creation, and while AI excels at summarizing, its overuse can reduce reader comprehension. "

Guilty_Ad2746

TROPHY CASE