[HN Gopher] Antislop: A framework for eliminating repetitive pat...
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Antislop: A framework for eliminating repetitive patterns in
language models
Author : Der_Einzige
Score : 85 points
Date : 2025-10-23 16:36 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| DarmokJalad1701 wrote:
| You're absolutely right!
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| What a brilliant observation you've made.
| asmor wrote:
| This is such a nuanced view on things!
| mrbungie wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop
|
| [2] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=AI+slop
| jsheard wrote:
| 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).
| mrbungie wrote:
| 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.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| 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".
| the8472 wrote:
| 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).
| yawnxyz wrote:
| Honestly "slop" should also be retroactively applied to e.g.
| Buzzfeed content; it shouldn't just be AI-centric
| louthy wrote:
| 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.
| iahds9uasd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Nothing wrong with that, but at (1) least reference it or (2)
| define it yourself explicitly.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| 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.
| palmotea wrote:
| > 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 _Stealth_
| slop, and when slop is harder to detect we'll all waste more
| time on it.
| ottah wrote:
| In practice, it's used for anything the speaker doesn't approve
| of, regardless of quality. When someone uses it, it basically
| tells me, I don't have anything critical to say, beyond I don't
| like a thing.
| topaz0 wrote:
| I came here to say this -- it's going to be slop no matter
| what.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| we're calling it compu-slop
| sixwing wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Does this actually work or would the slop just become more
| subtle?
| atourgates wrote:
| 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.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I dont use ChatGPT very often, though perplexity has it, but I
| find that going all caps and sounding really angry helps them
| to fix things.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Ah, you've hit a classic problem with <SUBJECT>
| :smile_with_sweat_drop:. Your intuition is right-- but let me
| clarify some subtleties...
| gowld wrote:
| > Honestly, it's kind of helpful because it makes it really
| easy to recognize content that people have copied and pasted
| out of ChatGPT
|
| Maybe it's intentional, like the "shiny" tone applied to
| "photorealistic" images of real people.
| teeray wrote:
| You can take my em-dashes from my cold, dead hands--I use them
| all the time.
| merelysounds wrote:
| On iOS in particular the longer dash variants are easy to
| access -- via long pressing dash.
|
| Anecdotally, I use them less often these days, because of the
| association with AI.
| antoniojtorres wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| photonthug wrote:
| Agree, this stuff was trending up very fast before AI.
|
| Could be my own changing perspective, but what I think is
| interesting is how the signal it sends keeps changing. At
| first, emoji-heavy was actually kind of positive: maybe the
| project doesn't need a webpage, but you took some time and
| interest in your README.md. Then it was negative: having
| emoji's became a strong indicator that the whole README was
| going to be very low information density, more emotive than
| referential[1] (which is fine for bloggery but not for
| technical writing).
|
| Now there's no signal, but you also can't say it's exactly
| neutral. Emojis in docs will alienate some readers, maybe
| due to association with commercial stuff and marketing
| where it's pretty normalized. But skipping emojis alienates
| other readers, who might be smart and serious, but
| nevertheless are the type that would prefer WATCHME.youtube
| instead of README.md. There's probably something about all
| this that's related to "costly signaling"[2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakobson%27s_functions_of
| _lang... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costly_signaling
| _theory_in_evo...
| quintu5 wrote:
| There's a pattern to emoji use in docs, especially when
| combined with one or more other common LLM-generated
| documentation patterns, that makes it plainly obvious
| that you're about to read slop.
|
| Even when I create the first draft of a project's README
| with an LLM, part of the final pass is removing those
| slop-associated patterns to clarify to the reader that
| they're not reading unfiltered LLM output.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| ChatGPT is made for normies--they love sweatdrop emojis. I
| recommend https://ai.dev
| noir_lord wrote:
| "normies" such a weird way to divide the world into them and
| "us".
| esafak wrote:
| A TPU dies every time you say 'normie'.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| > 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!
| lazide wrote:
| Meanwhile, 90% of the population is asking it to write love
| letters for their bf's/gf's
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Man it is truly difficult to overstate all the behavioral
| health issues that have been emerging.
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| These are just symptoms and not the cause.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| This comes across as an unnecessary oversimplification in
| service of handwaving away a valid concern about AI and
| its already-observed, expanding impact on our society. At
| the very least you should explain what you mean exactly.
|
| Alcoholism can also be a symptom of a larger issue.
| Should we not at least discuss alcohol's effects and what
| access looks like when deciding the solution?
| shagie wrote:
| A modern Cyrano de Bergerai.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Setting ChatGPT personality to "Robot" pretty much does
| that for me.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| 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.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| It is far more polite than any social media platform or
| forum I've ever seen lol
| diamond559 wrote:
| Hal was completely competent, until it wasn't... This is
| like Hal .9 beta mode.
| pimeys wrote:
| 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.
| bakugo wrote:
| Don't forget the classic: "It's not just X--it's Y."
| rogerkirkness wrote:
| This is the main thing that immediately tells me something is
| AI. This form of reasoning was much less common before
| ChatGPT.
| topaz0 wrote:
| I don't think this is true. The LLMs use this construction
| noticeably more frequently than normal people, and I too
| feel the annoyance when they do, but if you look around I
| think you'll find it's pretty common in many registers of
| human natural english.
| layer8 wrote:
| It's a pity that em-dashes are being much more shunned due to
| their LLM association than emojis.
| WASDx wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| For the longest time I didn't know you could change its
| personality. This helps a lot!
| neoCrimeLabs wrote:
| I am reasonably sure affirmations are a feature, not a bug. No
| matter how much I might disagree.
| joegibbs wrote:
| I notice this less with GPT-5 and GPT-5-Codex but it has a new
| problem: it'll write a sentence that mostly makes sense but
| have one or two strange word choices that nobody would use in
| that situation. It tends to use a lot of very dense jargon that
| makes it hard to read, spitting out references to various
| algorithms and concepts in places that don't actually make
| sense for them to be. Also yesterday Codex refused a task from
| me because it would be too much work, which I thought was
| pretty ridiculous - it wasn't actually that much work, a couple
| hundred lines max.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| watwut wrote:
| That is because corp speak is usually management-slop. A
| content devoid of ... content whose whole purpose is to make
| the author look important.
| jjangkke wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > This has side effect of making live performances by humans
| scarce and in valuable.
|
| RIP take-home coding assignments.
| mrbungie wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| meowface wrote:
| Slop is a much more general concept than that. I wish they
| would've picked a different term. "LLM fluff phrases" or
| something.
| layer8 wrote:
| diction, phraseology
| growdark wrote:
| 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.
| jampa wrote:
| 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...
| Bolwin wrote:
| See the writing benchmarks here
| https://eqbench.com/creative_writing_longform.html
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Note this is the same first author
| topaz0 wrote:
| 100% of LLM output is slop. Done.
| skywhopper wrote:
| 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.
| tartoran wrote:
| Yep. Sanitized slop is still slop.
| Lerc wrote:
| _> 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.
| hatthew wrote:
| I've seen it used enough that it's clear to me that the
| implied definition is "low-quality and/or low effort AI-
| generated content", and the actual usage is "AI generated
| content that I don't like". But both of those definitions
| very clearly refer to the piece of content as a whole, rather
| than specific parts of the content.
| ottah wrote:
| Slop is what you make, when I don't morally approve, or value
| critical nuance. WWE is slop, soap operas are slop, romance
| novels are slop, scifi is slop, etc.
| voldacar wrote:
| 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?
| westurner wrote:
| ScholarlyArticle: "Antislop: A Comprehensive Framework for
| Identifying and Eliminating Repetitive Patterns in Language
| Models" (2025) https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 :
|
| > Abstract: [...] _Our approach combines three innovations: (1)
| The Antislop Sampler, which uses backtracking to suppress
| unwanted strings at inference time without destroying vocabulary;
| (2) An automated pipeline that profiles model-specific slop
| against human baselines and generates training data; (3) Final
| Token Preference Optimization (FTPO), a novel fine-tuning method
| that operates on individual tokens, surgically adjusting logits
| wherever a banned pattern has appeared in an inference trace._
|
| From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45546037#45585680 , an
| additional potential method:
|
| >> _Could build a simple heuristic: if similar memory content
| gets created /updated N times within short timeframe, flag it as
| potential loop_
| orbital-decay wrote:
| This seems to be fundamentally based on n-grams and manually
| built regexes. "Slop", or more narrowly annoying -isms and model
| stereotypes, is not just repetitive n-gram sequences, mode
| collapse manifests itself semantically. Sometimes
| repetition/stereotyping is desirable (you need semantics to
| understand if it's the case), and sometimes undesirable
| repetition is undetectable by n-grams and regexes, especially in
| languages that rely on word formation. Fixing the mode collapse
| probably needs a sufficiently powerful reference model of
| semantic diversity, which doesn't currently exist.
| Lucian6 wrote:
| The repetitive pattern detection approach described here is
| fascinating from an implementation perspective. We encountered
| similar challenges when building our interview feedback system -
| specifically around detecting and eliminating repetitive filler
| phrases that added no value ("um", "like", "you know").
|
| What worked well for us was implementing a two-stage pipeline:
| first using a sliding window (n=3) to detect repeated n-grams,
| then applying cosine similarity with a threshold of 0.85 to catch
| semantic duplicates. This reduced redundant content by ~40% while
| preserving meaningful repetition (e.g. when candidates
| deliberately emphasize key points).
|
| One challenge we haven't fully solved: distinguishing between
| harmful repetition and intentional rhetorical devices. Have
| others found effective heuristics for this? We're currently
| experimenting with attention patterns in the transformer layers
| to identify deliberate vs. unintentional repetition, but results
| are mixed.
| topaz0 wrote:
| Easy -- turn off the computer and have a competent human do the
| interview
| bn-l wrote:
| Chatgpt-5:
|
| Oof---gotcha here's how I'd handle that
|
| Clutch choice---here's a few refinements
|
| Sweet---let me just...
|
| Ok, here's the receipts
|
| I love your passion! Let's try to keep it civil ok?
|
| (Thinking) the user still appears annoyed
|
| ---------------------------
|
| I think this annoys them also and yet they can't change it? Or
| are they not dogfooding?
| gwern wrote:
| This is the epitome of patching symptoms rather than treating the
| disease. Even if you suppress the obvious syntactic slop like
| 'it's not X but Y', you have no reason to believe you've fixed
| mode-collapse on higher more important levels like semantics and
| creativity. (For example, Claude LLMs have always struck me as
| mode-collapsed on a semantic level: they don't have the blatant
| verbal tics of 4o but somehow they still 'go in circles'.) Which
| will potentially severely hinder the truly high-value
| applications of LLMs to creative applications like frontier
| research. To the extent that this succeeds in hiding the brain
| damage in contemporary LLMs, it arguably is a cure worse than the
| disease.
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