Antislop: A framework for eliminating repetitive patterns in language models
62 comments
·October 23, 2025atourgates
estimator7292
Ah, you've hit a classic problem with <SUBJECT> :smile_with_sweat_drop:. Your intuition is right-- but let me clarify some subtleties...
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WASDx
You can customize it to get rid of all that. I set it to the "Robot" personality and a custom instruction to "No fluff and politeness. Be short and get straight to the point. Don't overuse bold font for emphasis."
jhack
For the longest time I didn't know you could change its personality. This helps a lot!
teeray
You can take my em-dashes from my cold, dead hands—I use them all the time.
neoCrimeLabs
I am reasonably sure affirmations are a feature, not a bug. No matter how much I might disagree.
antoniojtorres
The emoji thing is so bad. You can see it all over github docs and other long form docs. All section headers will have emojis and so on. Strange.
thraxil
Obviously nothing solid to back this up, but I kind of feel like I was seeing emojis all over github READMEs on JS projects for quite a while before AI picked it up. I feel like it may have been something that bled over from Twitch streaming communities.
pimeys
Or... How can you detect the usage of Claude models in a writeup? Look for the word comprehensive, especially if it's used multiple times throughout the article.
layer8
It’s a pity that em-dashes are being much more shunned due to their LLM association than emojis.
BolexNOLA
> Affirmations at the start of messages. ("That's a great idea!") With a brief pause when 5 launched. But it's back and worse than ever now.
What a great point! I also can’t stand it. I get it’s basically a meme to point it out - even South Park has mocked it - but I just cannot stand it.
In all seriousness it’s so annoying. It is a tool, not my friend, and considering we are already coming from a place of skepticism with many of the responses, buttering me up does not do anything but make me even more skeptical and trust it less. I don’t want to be told how smart I am or how much a machine “empathizes” with my problem. I want it to give me a solution that I can easily verify, that’s it.
Stop wasting my tokens and time with fake friendship!
SoftTalker
Drives me nuts too. All the stuff like "OK let me do..." Or "I agree ..." stop talking like a person.
I want the star trek experience. The computer just says "working" and then gives you the answer without any chit-chat. And it doesn't refer to itself as if it's a person.
What we have now is Hal 9000 before it went insane.
layer8
Setting ChatGPT personality to “Robot” pretty much does that for me.
cyanydeez
Guys. It's basically because among the all well researched data, the amount of garbage is infinitely more.
If AI wants to be useful (it's not going to atm), real people need to cull all the banalities that facebook, reddit & forums have generated.
Because what you're noticing is things we typically elide over in discussions with actual humans.
jjangkke
There will be an intersection when the techniques and continued refinements in making tall tale signs of AI and new powerful model meets where it becomes very time consuming, expensive and difficult to tell between human generated and AI generated content.
We are already at a point where we can trick large number of the population, it can without a doubt close the gap even further where we question anything and everything.
Beyond forensics, which require large capital investment and operating costs, to be able to detect AI vs human content will be limited in terms of access. It will be so that its not that we can't detect AI content anymore its that most people cannot afford the service to detect it and thus they lose interest.
This has side effect of making live performances by humans scarce and in valuable.
teeray
> This has side effect of making live performances by humans scarce and in valuable.
RIP take-home coding assignments.
mrbungie
Also RIP any take-home assignment that depends at least partially on writing prose/essays.
Schools will need to reinvent themselves in some ways.
sorokod
That narrowing gap is where we humans find purpose and meaning.
If an impersonation of an opera singer can't be distinguished from the real thing, what would be the point of the real thing?
mrbungie
I don't know if not getting the idea right, but I'm pretty sure people refer to AI outputs as "slop" not due to (only) repetitiveness. According to some sources:
[1] Wikipedia
> AI slop is digital content made with generative artificial intelligence, specifically when perceived to show a lack of effort, quality or deeper meaning, and an overwhelming volume of production.[1][4][5] Coined in the 2020s, the term has a pejorative connotation similar to spam.[4]
[2] Urban dictionary
> Low-quality randomly generated AI content (images, accounts, text, etc) that has been flooding social media sites among other pages.
Yes, I know those may not be the best primary sources, but I'd say the main shared meaning of the word is lack of quality and effort, not repetitiveness itself.
palmotea
> I don't know if not getting the idea right, but I'm pretty sure people refer to AI outputs as "slop" not due to (only) repetitiveness. According to some sources:
Yeah, slop is low effort use of AI output ("ChatGPT, write me a blog post about using AI in industry X. Copy. Paste. Publish."). If anything this is should be called Stealthslop, and when slop is harder to detect we'll all waste more time on it.
iahds9uasd
The LLM erotic roleplaying community's usage of "slop" aligns with the definition in this paper, so it's not without precedent. Several novel sampling methods have originated from that community trying to address this specific issue.
mrbungie
Nothing wrong with that, but at (1) least reference it or (2) define it yourself explicitly.
Der_Einzige
Yup. You see this with the very first projects to get a new sampler being oobabooga text gen webui, sillytavern circa early 2023 with min_p. Same with diffusion models. First projects to get new denoising algorithms are ComfyUI, Automatic1111, etc.
the8472
Gain-of-function research to create memetic-immune-system-evading AI variants.
> Ethics Statement
> Potential harms include: [...] (ii) attempts to evade AI-text detection.
And it's not clear to me how their mitigations would avoid fooling users (as opposed to algorithmic detection attempts).
jsheard
Yeah, what this actually achieves if anything is making it harder to quickly recognize slop for what it is, so readers are more likely to give it the benefit of the doubt and keep their eyeballs on it for longer. Which I suppose is desirable if you're in the slop-mongering business (e.g. doing SEO spam or other such methods of flooding the commons with sewage for the sake of profit).
moritzwarhier
Fits into a broad pattern of deceptive LLM terminology, for example "Deep Research": a humble and honest moniker would me "Reflection" or "Recursive self-prompting".
mrbungie
Yep, and their only reference to the word points to a survey that does not mention slop even once (A survey onllm-generated text detection: Necessity, methods, and future directions. Computational Linguistics, 51(1):275–338, 2025., https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.14724)
That's sloppy (hehe), if you are going to redefine a common word for the first time (i.e. references are not possible) at least do it explicitly.
yawnxyz
Honestly "slop" should also be retroactively applied to e.g. Buzzfeed content; it shouldn't just be AI-centric
louthy
It isn’t AI centric, it’s derived from poor quality wet food. Often given to pigs or used to describe prison food. It’s the origin of the term ‘sloppy’.
Colloquially it means ‘poor quality’ and always has done. So buzzfeed is journalism slop, just like poor quality AI content is AI slop.
voldacar
Instead of "surgically adjusting" logits within an existing model, couldn't you just build the slop detector into the loss function during the initial training stage?
meowface
Slop is a much more general concept than that. I wish they would've picked a different term. "LLM fluff phrases" or something.
layer8
diction, phraseology
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growdark
I'd love to see a benchmark that tests different LLMs for slop, not necessarily limited to code. That might be even more interesting than ARC-AGI.
Bolwin
See the writing benchmarks here https://eqbench.com/creative_writing_longform.html
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jampa
Not a benchmark per se, but there is a "Not x, but y" Slop Leaderboard:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1lv2t7n/not_x_b...
sixwing
i took a swing at an anti-slop skill for Claude Code, this week: https://github.com/rand/cc-experiments/tree/main/skills/anti...
growdark
Does this actually work or would the slop just become more subtle?
SoftTalker
I honestly can’t always distinguish AI slop from the formulaic corp-speak used in emails and memos and brochure websites and other marketing. I’m guessing that must be a large component of the training matter.
cyanydeez
I'd say the majority of the training data is reddit with zero care about whether it's from a "good" or "sarcastic" or "ironic" source.
skywhopper
That’s not what “slop” means. Slop is output produced by generative AI without regards to its quality, not the telltale tics that current models tend to exhibit.
Lerc
>That’s not what “slop” means
It's a new term so the meaning hasn't had a chance to settle. It's generally considered to be a negative term, so there's motivation for people to expand the definition to include things that they don't like. It is much easier to subvert a category than it is to make an argument for an individual item.
Imagine if people accept that falling rocks kill hundreds of people every year, and you wanted to convince them that falling cheese also kills plenty of people.
It would be much easier to imply that cheese, often coming in large roundish lumps, counts as a type of rock. It stretches the definition a bit but it's still much easier to argue than the actual falling cheese argument that is your actual agenda.
When the definition is new it is more malleable. Sometimes you might need a qualifier to declare it is different but imply it is essentially like the other thing. It's just a dairy-rock, or just enhanced-interrogation.
tartoran
Yep. Sanitized slop is still slop.
calvinmorrison
we're calling it compu-slop
DarmokJalad1701
You're absolutely right!
I've been using ChatGPT fairly regularly for about a year. Mostly as an editor/brainstorming-partner/copy-reviewer.
Lots of things have changed in that year, but the things that haven't are:
* So, so many em-dashes. All over the place. (I've tried various ways to get it to stop. None of them have worked long term).
* Random emojis.
* Affirmations at the start of messages. ("That's a great idea!") With a brief pause when 5 launched. But it's back and worse than ever now.
* Weird adjectives it gets stuck on like "deep experience".
* Randomly bolded words.
Honestly, it's kind of helpful because it makes it really easy to recognize content that people have copied and pasted out of ChatGPT. But apart from that, it's wild to me that a $500bn company hasn't managed to fix those persistent challenges over the course of a year.