[HN Gopher] Slop Detective - Fight the Slop Syndicate
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Slop Detective - Fight the Slop Syndicate
Author : speckx
Score : 67 points
Date : 2025-11-26 16:24 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (slopdetective.kagi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (slopdetective.kagi.com)
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| We wrote the paper on how to remove slop from LLMs.
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061
|
| Also somewhat tangentially relevant video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tsp2bC0Db8o
| pbaehr wrote:
| I feel like this is a good educational goal but a very poor
| execution.
|
| We're meant to assume correct sentences were written by humans
| and AI adds glaring factual errors. I don't think it is possible
| at this point to tell a single human written sentence from an AI
| written sentence with no other context and it's dangerous to
| pretend it is this easy.
|
| Several of the AI images included obvious mistakes a human
| wouldn't have made, but some of them also just seemed like
| entirely plausible digital illustrations.
|
| Oversimplifying generative AI identification risks overconfidence
| that makes you even easier to fool.
|
| Loosely related anecdote: A few months ago I showed an
| illustration of an extinct (bizarre looking) fish to a group of
| children (ages 10-13ish). They immediately started yelling that
| it was AI. I'm glad they are learning that images can be fake,
| but I actually had to explain that "Yes, I know this is not a
| photo. This animal is long extinct and this is what we think it
| looked like so a person drew it. No one is trying to fool you."
| AJ007 wrote:
| Kind of reminds me of the junk forensic fire science. "Slop
| Detective" might have been nice in 2022, now its slop itself.
| Maybe this is an old link? If someone just published this in
| the last 90 days, they are an idiot.
|
| There's a lot of anti-AI sentiment in the art world (not news)
| but real artists are now actively accused of using AI and
| getting kicked off reddit or whatever. That tells me there is
| going to be 0 market for 100% human created art, not the other
| way around.
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| Ironically, it seems the descriptions are AI-written?
|
| (minor spoiler)
|
| The text accompanying an image of a painting:
|
| > This image shows authentic human photography with natural
| imperfections, consistent lighting, and realistic proportions
| that indicate genuine capture rather than artificial generation.
| Meindert Hobbema. The Avenue at Middelharnis (1689, National
| Gallery, London)
| phreack wrote:
| What bugs me the most about nearly everyone selling AI products
| is that they apparently want or need to believe in the power of
| LLMs for everything, not just the product, and this means that
| they also generate the explanatory texts and descriptions and
| readmes and... it makes the product itself feel of a much worse
| quality.
|
| I don't mind that you're selling an AI product if it's good but
| at least put some humanity on the marketing side.
| lukeinator42 wrote:
| I was just thinking this. The wikipedia "signs of ai writing"
| that another commenter linked to
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing)
| mentions LLMs overuse the 'rule of three' (e.g. natural
| imperfections, consistent lighting, and realistic proportions),
| haha.
| vintagedave wrote:
| Curiously it focuses on overly descriptive phrasing, and
| factually incorrect statements, as signs of AI.
|
| I don't think this is accurate. AI has a flavour or tone we all
| know, but it could have generated factually plausible statements
| (that you could not diagnose in this test) or plausible text.
|
| I could not tell the real from fake music at all.
|
| I support (and pay for) Kagi, but wasn't overly impressed here.
| At worst I think it might give people too much confidence.
| Wikipedia has a great guideline on spotting AI text and I think
| the game here should integrate and reflect its contents:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Right. Its examples fall into categories like:
|
| - AI slop is trivially factually wrong, and frequently
| overconfident.
|
| - AI slop is verbose.
|
| But, as you note, IRL this is not usually the case. It might
| have been true in the GPT-3.5 or early GPT-4 days, but things
| have moved on. GPT-5.1 Pro can be laconic and is rarely
| factually wrong.
|
| The best way to identify AI slop text is by their use of
| special and nonstandard characters. A human would usually write
| "Gd2O3" for gadolinium oxide, whereas an AI would default to
| "Gd2O3". Chat-GPT also loves to use the non-breaking hyphen
| (U+2011), whereas all humans typically use the standard hyphen-
| minus character (U+002D). There's more along these lines. The
| issue is that the bots are _too scrupulously correct_ in the
| characters they use.
|
| As for music, it can be very tough to distinguish.
| Interestingly, there are some genres of music that are entirely
| beyond the ability of AI to replicate.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _Interestingly, there are some genres of music that are
| entirely beyond the ability of AI to replicate._
|
| Sounds interesting, what are some of those genres?
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| You'll find this surprising, but Suno is completely and
| utterly incapable of generating ambient music like this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsA-jxQsx8I
|
| It simply doesn't get it. This sort of thing probably
| wasn't in its training data.
|
| The really interesting thing is that when I upload
| something like that track, and tell it to compose something
| similar, it usually gives me an error and refunds my
| credits.
|
| Also, and this is far more mainstream, both Suno and
| ElevenLabs are totally incapable of generating anything
| like, e.g., Darkthrone's "Transylvanian Hunger." Music that
| is intentionally unpolished is anathema to them.
|
| I could go on. There are lots. I think that they understand
| melody and harmony, but they don't understand atmosphere,
| just in general...
| vanderZwan wrote:
| > _But, as you note, IRL this is not usually the case._
|
| Except for the huge the amounts of already generated slop
| that is combined with SEO to pop up in search results
| visarga wrote:
| Oh, if you finetune GPT-4 on an author it assumes the style
| so well that people prefer it to human experts doing the
| same job
|
| > "Readers Prefer Outputs of AI Trained on Copyrighted
| Books over Expert Human Writers"
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| I'm like 99.99999% sure that the usage of non standard
| characters, em dash, fancy quotes, "it's not X, it's Y" etc
| was clearly done on purpose from the very beginning and
| pushed for by various parties who have a strong vested
| interest in monitoring who is using AI and how it's being
| used.
|
| I kneel Hideo Kojima. You saw this all coming:
| https://youtu.be/PnnP4sA80D8
| daotoad wrote:
| > whereas all humans typically use the standard hyphen-minus
| character (U+002D).
|
| I made it a point to learn to type the em dash--only to have
| it stolen by the bots; it's forced me to become reacquainted
| with my long lost friend, the semicolon.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Hah, well, there's that.
|
| But I was referring to the special hyphen that the AIs
| frequently use today, and which is a hallmark of AI
| generated text, as it's not on regular keyboards and
| difficult to access:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Non-breaking_hyphen
|
| They're also fond of this apostrophe: '
|
| Whereas almost every human uses: '
| benrutter wrote:
| > I could not tell the real from fake music at all.
|
| Not sure if it's in my head (haven't done a blind test or
| anything) but all AI music I've heard has painfully bad drum
| acoustics (very clicky). Seems like the most tell tale marker,
| although would love to make a "spot the AI song" game to prove
| myself right/wrong.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| I found the music trivially distiguishable or at least I
| thought it was. Maybe I just got lucky. The AI songs had lyrics
| that, to me, seemed like something that wouldn't be in most
| songs. I've heard far better AI generated songs that I'd have a
| hard time distguishing if I wasn't told.
| alfon wrote:
| But then it wouldn't classify as slop?
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| > I could not tell the real from fake music at all.
|
| Perhaps this is just a sign for you to listen to more (human)
| music is all!
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _I support (and pay for) Kagi, but wasn 't overly impressed
| here_
|
| This website strikes me as merely a marketing gimmick.
| yesfitz wrote:
| I like the idea, but I think the game progression needs another
| pass from a designer.
|
| I started on "Level 1" and got 2 things wrong (both false
| positives if it matters) and instead of feeling like I learned
| anything, I felt as though I was set up to fail because the image
| prompt was missing sufficient context or the text prompt was too
| simple to be human. Either I was dumb or the game was dumb.
|
| Maybe I'm just too old and 8-11 year-old kids wouldn't be so
| easily discouraged, but I'd recommend:
|
| 1. Picking on one member of the "slop syndicate" at a time.
|
| 2. Show some examples (evidence) before beginning the evaluation.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >Water is wet. Wetness is what water has. What makes water water
| is that it's wet. The wetness of water means water is wet. So
| water has wetness.
|
| >This was actually AI-generated slop! Repeats 'water is wet'
| multiple times.
|
| I didn't know writing "water is wet" repeatedly was enough to de-
| humanize you.
|
| >In many situations, it could be argued that grass may sometimes
| appear to have a greenish quality, though this might not always
| be the case.
|
| >This was actually AI-generated slop! Won't commit to 'grass is
| green' and uses uncertain words.
|
| What? Not all grass is green.
|
| Fun times ahead.
| Tiberium wrote:
| The idea is great; the actual implementation is, frankly,
| horrible.
|
| First of all, there are only 27 "slop" image examples, but 200
| real ones - very bad ratio. And almost all real examples are just
| dated photographs, paintings, photos of old books - there are
| genuinely 0 (not joking) modern photos or digital artwork. Also
| multiple "slop" image examples were actual screenshots of ChatGPT
| interface or clearly cropped screenshots.
|
| Text is even worse - they somehow present it as if LLMs cannot
| write factually correct or simple text.
|
| I genuinely believe that they should take this down immediately
| and do a major rework, because at this stage it will only do
| harm. It might teach the children or adults who complete this
| that AI can never write factually correct text or create very
| realistic-looking photos (good luck with with Nano Banana Pro).
|
| P.S. To see how bad it is, just scrape
| https://slopdetective.kagi.com/data/images/not_slop/{file} from
| image_001.webp to 200 and slop/image_001.webp to 027.
|
| Also see
| https://slopdetective.kagi.com/data/text/slop/l3_lines.json and
| https://slopdetective.kagi.com/data/text/not_slop/l3_lines.j...
| for real vs LLM-written text.
| plorg wrote:
| Clicking through 4 examples I found it hard to understand even
| what I was looking at. All 4 appeared to just be garbage that a
| human could get Canva to shit out in a couple of minutes, but
| the features that put them in the AI Slop bucket were things
| that identified the "slop", not the AI.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| A better art test?
|
| https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ai-art-turing-test
|
| Though maybe these are not examples of "slop" but instead good
| use of AI?
| __jonas wrote:
| Not sure where to submit a bug report but I chose the option for
| kids and got this as the 'correct' message for a painting:
|
| > Correct! Well done, detective!
|
| > This image shows authentic human photography with natural
| imperfections, consistent lighting, and realistic proportions
| that indicate genuine capture rather than artificial generation.
|
| > Albert Pinkham Ryder, Seacoast in Moonlight (1890, the Phillips
| Collection, Washington)
|
| The image is not photography, I guess technically it's a
| photograph of a painting but still, confusing text.
| ratixyz wrote:
| Hi, dev from Kagi here. You can submit the bug report on
| https://kagifeedback.org.
| jedbrooke wrote:
| I got tripped up by this one (sorry for spoilers):
|
| > Bees collect pollen from flowers and make honey. They also
| drive tiny cars to get from flower to flower!
|
| The explanation given is that it's not factually correct,
| therefore it's AI slop. Maybe I didn't pay enough attention to
| the instructions, but aren't humans also capable of creating text
| that is not factually correct, and at times is done so not out of
| ignorance for for artistic or humorous purposes? This example
| here sounds like something that would be written by a child with
| an active imagination, and not likely the kind of "seems
| plausible but is actually false" slop that LLMs come up with.
| iterance wrote:
| Correctness is a poor way to distinguish between human-authored
| and AI-generated content. Even if it's right, which I doubt (can
| humans not make wrong statements?), it doesn't do anything to
| help someone who doesn't know much about what they're searching.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| The first music sample for 8th-12th graders I got which was like
| this charming instrumental chiptune-ey piece was so good (and
| real) but I can't find it again and forgot to try and shazam it
| or something. Did anyone else get it/know the song?
| modzu wrote:
| the whole site itself is slop... lol
|
| hey kids, learn about ai slop by reading this guide to ai slop
| written by ai and full of ai slop mistakes. sheesh
| charcircuit wrote:
| >What is "Slop":
|
| >Fake stuff made by computers that tries to look like it was made
| by real people. It's everywhere online!
|
| Tricking people is not what makes it slop. Being low quality is
| what makes it slop. This is a dangerous definition as it could
| mean that anything AI generated could be considered slop, even if
| it was higher quality than regular things.
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(page generated 2025-11-26 23:01 UTC)