A personal essay recounting the experience of judging a technical writing contest with four hundred entries, most of which read as suspiciously polished, formulaic AI-generated 'slop.' The author develops twenty-two informal rules for spotting authentic writing (grudges, risky numbers, admitted confusion, specific settings, non-triadic structure, etc.), tests them against an old human-written vendor whitepaper (which fails most rules too), and turns them on his own writing (which also fails some). Concludes that the real differentiator isn't style but 'cost' - what the sentence risked or cost the author to write - and that AI didn't invent slop, it just removed the price floor on producing it.
Table of contents
The Spreadsheet Began on Day TwoThe Rules, Which I Wrote Down at Night, in a Dressing GownDay Nine, and Some Loss of PerspectiveThen, Because I Am a Certain Kind of Person, I Ran It on MyselfThe Entry That WonWhat I Would Tell You, Having Been Through It27.2K Impressions2 Comments