February 19, 2026
But here’s the slop
/Deslop
AI ‘Deslop’ guide drops; commenters roast it as slop — ‘Just write like a human’
TLDR: A marketing agency posted a list of 12 signs of robot-sounding writing and a prompt to “deslop” it. Commenters pushed back hard: many say don’t use AI at all, others joked the post reads like AI, and one flexed a research link—fueling a spicy fight over authentic writing.
An agency called Mooch dropped a “12 red flags of AI writing” post on Substack, plus a prompt to /deslop your prose. Think: endless em dashes, the dramatic “Not X. But Y.” reversals, “But here’s the thing” pivots, soft hedging, staccato sentences, and cookie‑cutter paragraphs. Translation: it’s a checklist for spotting robot-sounding writing—and cleaning it up.
The comments went nuclear. “Just write like a human,” cried the purists, with piker insisting, “Just don’t use LLMs… Think and then write.” Leynos rolled their eyes at the meta-policing, calling the author a “comic book guy wannabe” and pleading to follow their own rules. fxwin torched the premise that “we’re all using AI,” framing Substack as the land of writing to post, not to be read. The biggest dunk: stuaxo saying the piece itself “feels LLM written.” Then Der_Einzige swaggered in with a link: “We wrote the paper on deslopping LLM,” turning the thread into a flex-off. Meanwhile, jokers spammed “But here’s the bind” pivots and started “Em‑Dash Anonymous,” parodying cookie-cutter blog cadence by dropping single-sentence replies. The vibe: half self-help for writers, half roast battle over authenticity. Whether you love AI or loathe it, the takeaway is simple: if your post sounds like a terms-and-conditions page, the crowd will /deslop you.
Key Points
- •Mooch presents a list of AI writing “red flags” and paired “green flag” rewrites to improve clarity and tone.
- •Phrasing issues include overuse of em dashes, the “Not X. But Y.” corrective antithesis, dramatic pivot phrases, and soft hedging language.
- •Rhythm issues include repetitive staccato sentences and uniform, cookie-cutter paragraph lengths.
- •Each red flag is illustrated with examples and a more direct, readable alternative.
- •Mooch says it created a “/deslop” prompt intended to clean AI-influenced writing patterns from content.