Did you receive AI slop? I’d like to see it.

AI makes text easier to write and harder to read.

That’s the fundamental issue with using AI to improve your “writing productivity.” Effective writing involves planning, thinking, and originality. If you ask AI to do the writing for you, it eliminates all that planning, thinking, and originality and replaces it with ineffective prose.

AI-generated slop makes it harder for readers to figure out what you’re trying to get across. Human writing is often puzzling, but somehow, AI-generated writing is almost always puzzling.

The Iron Imperative is that you must treat reader’s time as more valuable than your own. AI-generated writing does this backwards: it saves you time but wastes the reader’s time.

Please send us your slop

My partner in Writing Without Slop, Jessica Weber Metzenroth, and I are dedicated to identifying in detail just what it is about AI-generated content that creates problems. To do that, we need to collect as much slop as possible to analyze. We have become slop anthropologists, and we need your help with the research observation.

Next time you receive an incomprehensible, infuriating, confusing, or weird email or document, don’t just get annoyed.

Send it to us. We’ve set up a slop drop just to collect slop samples.

We’ll test what you send us to see if it actually was written by AI. We’ll apply our writing and editing expertise to figure out why its problematic and how the writer could fix it. And to protect our sources, we will keep your name out of it and redact company details. We’re only interested in studying slop, not humiliating its creators who, as often as not, are slop victims themselves.

What do you get out of it? In addition to the psychic benefits of aiding our cause, you’ll be able to go back to whoever sent you the slop with a detailed analysis of why it caused problems and how to improve it.

One more thing. At the end of each quarter, we’ll pick the top slop: the piece of writing that most outrageously shows why using AI to write things is the opposite of efficient. We’ll send two copies of my book Writing Without Bullshit to the “winner.” You can keep one and learn from it. And you can give the other one to the person who sent you the slop, to clue them in on a better way to write.

Send us your slop. We’re waiting. . .