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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   32307 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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I want to revisit the comparison of AI slop with human slop, and whether AI is currently capable of writing.

I recently came across the most mind numbing and soulless writing in this series of articles: https://www.greenmatters.com/a/andrew-krosofsky . It has all the hallmarks of slop, hundreds of low effort articles, no clear theme, bored and soulless writing, etc. But guess what, it's written by a human! He was also really doing the grind, writing multiple articles per day. I also have receipts because the wayback machine shows his writing years before chatgpt existed: https://web.archive.org/web/20201015131543/https://www.greenmatters.com/a/andrew-krosofsky .

But I noticed something immediately. The writing was obviously human. It didn't have any of that uncanny valley feeling. There are no obvious falsehoods spoken like truth. No hallucinations. And even his worst articles are 1000x better than the typical AI fake news. This just reinforces my understanding:

Even the lowest dregs of the journalistic world write at a higher level than the best cutting edge AI models today.

Now I'm sure the AI bulls here will disagree. So I have 2 challenges for you all:

  1. Find a single hallucination in an article written by this author between 2021 and today. There are quite a few, so this should be easy if human writing is unreliable. For the purposes of this, a hallucination is a statement that is both provably false at the time of writing and not supported by a linked source.

  2. Demonstrate a technique for an AI model of your choice to reliably copywrite articles of a similar quality, over any arbitrary topic that has reputable sources available. Those articles must not have obvious AI tells, pass AI detection, and have a hallucination rate of less than 1 in 1000.

To put my money where my mouth is, I'll offer a wager of $50 for the first person to complete either of these challenges. But I think the fact that a human who is at the bottom of the journalistic world can handily do this but an AI can't should demonstrate the big gulf between human and AI that still exists.

One idea is to detect slop, by looking at how surprising and compressible an essay is. Einsteins theory of relativity would have been surprising for an LLM

Well, to shift the frame a bit, does it matter? Of the people who read an article titled "Will an Egg a Day Keep the Doctor Away, or Will It Simply Raise Your Cholesterol?", how many do care about whether its contents are factual and well-sourced*, and how many just want the qualia of reading an article about something to while away their time on the mortal coil? Depending on what the product of human writers that the market actually demands is, yours might just be yet another case of writing off cars for being inadequate horses.

*and does it even make a difference if the source chain just bottoms out in some garbage p-hacked nutrition paper that will be forgotten in five years when some slop research lab decides to p-hack up a new paper on the topic? What fraction of writing anywhere is about something more than the qualia of writing and reading something like the thing it pretends to be? Perhaps straight up making up citations is just cutting out some layers of indirection in the con.

tl;dr: Rather than being more bullish on AI, I think you ought to be more bearish on humanity.

In my imo it matters whether or not people are reading fake slop articles in fake hallucination la-la-land rather than real human slop. If the reader really needs the sensation of reading something with no truth value, there are plenty of mlp fanfics out there to help satisfy the qualia.

Yes every clickbait article about a p-hacked paper about how a glass of wine a day is good/bad is bad. But at least if it goes viral it's a sort of shared experience. Something that can be debunked. And something that can be talked about. If someone tells you he just read that a glass of wine a day is good you can roll your eyes and start talking about p-hacking or experimental methodology.

If AI slop makes it up, it can't be debunked. It's harder to disprove something nakedly asserted than something eventually attributed to an unreliable source. And there's a literal infinite supply of AI slop, so there's no point.

Tangent: you're writing about AI slop so I was reminded of this Conversations with Tyler: Any Austin, on the "Hermeneutics of Video Games". Any is some kind of famous YouTube celebrity that I'd never heard of. Anyway, Tyler asked him about AI slop w.r.t. video games, and Any made this point that people shouldn't feel too outraged about encountering AI slop on authenticity grounds, because practically everyone's favorite art is inauthentic.

No one will because we can’t even tell now. The amount of times that you have conversations with people and they go, “This was . . .” Mozart’s a great example of this. I can’t get into that conversation because I don’t actually know that much, but my dad — he knows all the classical music and has all those books and reads all the things, but he was largely motivated by money. Yes, that was a big part of his motivation.

People say this when you talk about video games that get made — or music, actually, is probably the best example — “Oh, I know that was an authentic thing. That band, when they put out that album, that was an authentic piece of art,” or whatever.

Then you go and you read about the history, and it turns out that they made it under duress, and they didn’t really want to. They didn’t care about it. All of it is made up, whatever. To me, that makes it very obvious that we can’t even tell the difference between what we perceive as authentic human art versus inauthentic, so it’s very unlikely that we’re going to be very good at being able to tell the difference between AI generated art.

That's a fairly salient point. They weren't conveying some sacred part of the human spirit. They were serving up shit that sells. This isn't the definition of slop, but inauthenticity is the cousin of slop, sure.

It kind of aligns with a different semi-trolly comment I have where people whine that they wanted computers to automate housework, so they could be free to do art. Not automate art so they could spend more time on housework. It shouldn't be surprising that art is easier to automate: popular art is formulaic! Of course it's easy for robots to copy!

  1. I realize calling Mozart slop is odd, but plenty of classical musicians complain about how poppy his music was.

I think the question of authenticity is very simple to answer. The media I was exposed to in my formative teen years was obviously very authentic and deep. Anything produced since I have turned into a cynical adult is shallow consumerist drivel.

For real, I think that there are differences in authenticity. Take video games. On the one end of the spectrum you have games like nethack or dwarf fortress, where the motivation to build the game was clearly not not get rich. On the other hand of the spectrum, you have EA ${sport_franchise} ${current_year}. Perhaps there are devs in the world whose dream job is it to publish the same soccer game every year for a decade, each time with slightly better graphics and the current (licensed) roster, and they would totally do it as a hobby (if it was not for the license fees). But it seems more likely that EA has found that enough people will spend 50 Euros (or whatever) on the latest soccer game every year and are determined to milk that cash cow for the rest of time, and the devs of FIFA are only slightly more enthusiastic about their products than the devs of SAP.

Most games fall somewhere in the middle, with the devs seeing it as a dayjob which (hopefully) pays the bills while also being more fun than writing enterprise Java.

Likewise, there is value in originality. Stardew Valley is a competently written game of its genre, but that is not its claim to fame. It's claim to fame is that it basically invented the genre.

These two measures of authenticity are of course correlated. Large gaming studios are mostly risk-averse, and the bigger the title the less risk people are willing to take. If Stardew Valley had flopped in beta, ConcernedApe would have had to find a different way to make a living. If an AAA title tanks, quite a few people (some of them with decent paychecks) might lose their job. So of course the big studios imitate the indie devs who made it big, better a 80% chance at making a decent game than a 20% chance at making a groundbreaking game.

Stardew Valley did not invent a genre. Most of its mechanics are from the Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons series, which started in 1996.

And even if you want to distinguish Stardew Valley from Harvest Moon by SV's combat in the mines, Rune Factory had added it into the series by 2007.

It's actually kinda interesting to think about why it worked so well. It's an improvement in nearly every way from the A-gamer productions, even the ones that avoided handheld hell, but I dunno which one I'd point to as to what actually mattered in sales.

Your semi-trolly comment is based on the shared cultural assumptions that housework = drudgery and art = purpose. We can automate processes, but not purpose, so on the path to eliminating the drudgery of housework, we eliminate the drudgery of soulless art. But people want to do art - not corporate memphis prints of mixed families at a picnic, they want to express themselves. So even while corporations all converge on an art style specifically designed to be 'inoffensive' and mass produced, even as ai makes it trivial to 'bring your imagination to life' and ghiblify your photos, people wistfully dream of the day they can stop working and make art. IGOR beat Father of Asahd in every conceivable metric. We might not notice authenticity, but our brains do.

On a similar note, if you pick a career as an artist to make money, you should get the paint in your house tested for lead. You pick a career as an artist because you want to express yourself more than you want to make money - stupid maybe, but it's true. Sometimes you have to make money anyway though. Does that make your expression inauthentic? No, because it's still driven by purpose. And necessity is the mother of invention. Simply by choosing a life of squalor so you don't have to work 9 to 5 (what a way to make a livin! (fuck that's what I'm singing for the rest of the day now)) positions you to make authentic art. Does that mean you will make authentic art? No, you can still make slop for a paycheck, and that slop might even be popular if you put your soul into it. I don't think anyone would disagree that The Boondock Saints was slop, an attempt to cash in on the Tarantino bubble of 90s movies about hitmen. It is also earnest as fuck and people love it for that.

Artistry is at all times a battle between those who wish to express themselves and those who wish to turn that expression into money. Sometimes and in some places it leans one way, while in other times and places it leans the other. Hair metal and bands like Poison look soulless in comparison to Nirvana and Hair Metal dies, then grunge gets coopted by corporate and refined and streamlined until we get Creed, who look soulless in comparison to The Strokes, and so on, same as it ever was (in case you don't like Dolly).

grunge gets coopted by corporate and refined and streamlined until we get Creed, who look soulless in comparison to The Strokes

What a weird description of Creed, of all the bands you could have picked. Their lyrics are very sincere (if not especially subtle) expressions of Scott Stapp’s Christian faith. They’re far more “soulful”, in terms of heartfelt expression of their true beliefs and emotions, than nearly any other band within their same broad genre. There are plenty of reasons not to like Creed (although I’m certainly a Creed fan), but lack of soulfulness is an inapt one.

Poison, believe it or not, also projected authenticity - they really were into that glam rock party lifestyle - which is why Bret Michaels remained a celebrity despite gradually turning into Janice from the Muppets. But when you get sucked up into the music machine you look soulless in comparison to 'authentic' acts like Nirvana and The Strokes (which in a way is just the same machine in the bust part of the cycle.)

All of them are artists. Blackpink are artists. The Monkees were artists. They will look soulless anyway when coopted by the machine. And while I'll admit I don't know a lot about Creed, I'm pretty sure they were thoroughly coopted by the machine, just based on the radio play they got back then and how much everyone complained about it.

It is 100% true that Mozart wrote a song entitled "Lick me in the arse" (Leck mich im Arsch).

I like to bring that up in discussions of high culture. I no longer get invited to classy parties.

I feel like this is a far too strict definition of "authentic". Most popular art is commercial to some degree or another, artists gotta eat, even if they accrue other less tangible benefits like street cred or pussy.

What does that leave? Mostly amateur art. I don't see how why it's not possible for something to simultaneously be both a work of passion and yet selected to make at least some money.

That isn't to say that the concept of authenticity is an entirely useless concept! I think Nickelback is far less authentic than say, Tame Impala or the Arctic Monkeys. The latter, even after finding a hit formula, ended up making multiple albums that are better suited to jazz lounges and only really loved by the most diehard fans.

And then you have people who make mixtapes and distribute them for free, play in a garage band or upload to SoundCloud. Maximally authentic, most of it trash. Authenticity isn't a reliable proxy for quality, and probably anti-correlates once you account for confounders.

The idea of “authentic art isn’t made for money” comes from the early days of art when the artist had patrons. If you made art for money, you either didn’t appeal to elites enough to have a patron, or worse, were a dirty poor person. Only aristocrats and people they hired could afford to not think about money, ergo, thinking about money was a mark of poverty and poor quality.

Mozart’s a great example of this. I can’t get into that conversation because I don’t actually know that much, but my dad — he knows all the classical music and has all those books and reads all the things, but he was largely motivated by money. Yes, that was a big part of his motivation.

This is an absolutely idiotic example - Mozart constantly needed money because he lived lavishly beyond his means and spent so much time in aristocratic circles as a commoner that he was desperate to emulate them and would bankrupt himself for expensive clothes and horse carriages. His type of financial troubles are a well documented trope of the era, induced partly by more permissive social climbing between gentry and aristocracy. Since he was undoubtedly a musical genius, obviously he used his talents to make good money fast - it doesn't mean he put no artistic or musical considerations into what he composed!

Any Austin (or rather, his father) doesn't seem to understand that a court musician in the 18th Century was not receiving a pop-star salary, but would need other sources to income his expand his fortune to the point where it could even somewhat compete with an average city-dwelling aristocrat. Mozart wanted this badly - perhaps also because he saw how financially dependent his father had been on his patron, the Archbishop of Salzburg, to the point where his freedom of movement was strictly dictated to him, and wanted to avoid the same fate. The best, fastest, most respectable and well paying manner for someone with Mozarts caché and skills to make money was to take musical commissions.

And guess what? Those "non-money motivated" symphonies and operas we love and cherish Mozart for - those were commissions too! Il Seraglio, the Magic Flute, Don Giovanni were all commissions, since that was how large-scale musical arrangements were made and paid for before the rise of radio and television. The musician didn't just sit around strumming his harpsichord waiting for a hit to happen - they were subjects of courtly and church patronage and composed music in return for goods and services.

So I disagree that "Mozart was largely motivated by money" - Mozart was using his incredible talents and social reputation to leverage the best possible sources of income to finance his extravagant lifestyle. It doesn't make his melodies any less charming, nor does it dilute any kind of authentic artistic process if he received payment for having written them.

My favorite example of this is from the band Queen. I've often heard people say "Freddie wrote Who Wants to Live Forever after he found out he was diagnosed with AIDS" when the actual story is far more pedestrian: Brian May wrote it after viewing an early cut of the movie Highlander.

Wait, doesn't everyone know that Who Wants To Live Forever was written specifically for Highlander? It and Princes of the Universe are movie themes.

It's like hearing that somebody thought that Flash was written independently of Flash Gordon - of course it wasn't! Queen just scored some films, for commercial reasons! The songs became popular because Queen were/are damn good musicians, and sometimes that's enough. Good art doesn't need a sob story.

People online also say that Bohemian Rhapsody is about AIDS. There are just a lot of people really into analysis of lyrics who don't do a lot of research.

Dave Grohl had a great quote about people overanalyzing Nirvana lyrics that went something like "Sometimes Kurt just made up lyrics on the spot to fit the music. I watched him do it."

There's so much nonsense in analyzing fiction / lyrics / poetry, but people are having fun. It just gets annoying when they start lecturing you about media literacy.

@DradisPing @OliveTapenade @ChickenOverlord

They are confusing those songs with The Show Must Go On which the band really did write while Freddie Mercury was dying and is very much about that.

Yeah, I've come to realize that most of the art that we judge to have the deepest meaning and most heartfelt creation is just people working for a paycheck, under a deadline, and with no particular intent on making a masterpiece, indeed no way of knowing if anyone would even care about it after they released it.

Then, when one of these works of arts hits mainstream success, the narrative of its creation is amended to make it seem as though the sole motivation for its creation was the artists' outpouring of their soul and they dug deep into their well of angst and it was a work of pure creative oubrust.

Take for example the Song "Sweet Child O' Mine," by Guns N' Roses, which is undoubtedly a GREAT song on almost every level. Evocative, intensely emotional but energetic. Skill was involved in its creation, no doubt.

But how'd they compose the song and come up with such appropriate lyrics, especially the breakdown?

Almost pure fuckin' chance

During a jam session at the band's house in Sunset Strip, drummer Steven Adler and Slash were warming up and Slash began to play a "circus" melody while making faces at Adler.

LITERALLY just goofing around with each other and came up with an neat-sounding riff.

Then:

When the band recorded demos with producer Spencer Proffer, he suggested adding a breakdown at the song's end. The musicians agreed, but were not sure what to do. Listening to the demo in a loop, Rose started saying to himself, "Where do we go? Where do we go now?" and Proffer suggested that he sing that.

The iconic breakdown of the song wasn't so much the process of talented genius... it was an expression of uncertainty and some third party said "run with that."

(Side note, knowing this story makes me find this portion of the song hilarious if you pretend the band is literally asking the audience "hey guys we don't know how to end this song, any thoughts?" like a genuine question.)

How many songs are out there that have similar creation stories... but never got any popularity so nobody knows the story or would care anyway.

So much of life is just that. A confluence of random factors which we then create a retroactive narrative about to seem more meaningful ("authentic") than it really is.

That's musicians at work. Their work involves play, must involve play, because they are trying to tap into emotions through novel sound and poetry. The particular riff happened by chance, and Guns N' Roses maximized the situations where such a chance can occur, and trained to recognize such chances.

It's like Dorothea Lange's famous "Migrant Mother" photo. Lange finding that particular woman with such an expressive and sympathetic face while surrounded by young children is pure chance. But it's not like it could've happened to anyone. Lange maximized her ability to recognize the opportunity for such a photo, take it, and get it published.

Yes, I think most of success really is Talent, but dependent heavily on Motivation and Luck.

And that motivation, well, it can come from many places, both banal and esoteric or exotic. "I will go broke if I don't get this done" works.

Likewise, the 2015 song Renegades was originally written for a commercial advertising the Jeep Renegade. After I learned that, every time I heard the song on the radio, I felt I was listening to a glorified advertisement.

In fairness, I believe artists "pour their soul" into their art, to some extent, even when it's made with strict guidelines for a paycheck. Even non-art professional software, as evidenced by Easter eggs and the occasional feature that is unreasonably clever and well-implemented for no apparent reason. Ideas that come from "goofing around" aren't much different from those that come from insight, both arise from spontaneous thought. The opposite side of "people create a retroactive narrative to explain their actions", is that people's actions are influenced by their past experiences and suppressed desires, sometimes in ways they don't consciously realize.

Ha, I would have guessed it was for Apple, given all the effort Apple went to casting themselves as the brand for misunderstood geniuses and creative weirdos.

Literally using the name of the product in the song is a little on the nose.

I'm not complaining about slop because it's inauthentic. I'm complaining about it because it's bad. I'm talking about how AI is worse at writing and also more prone to falsehoods than the most lazy, and uninspired human writing out there.

More on topic of your comment, I personally like mainstream art more than the avant garde stuff. I'm pretty sure that some popular anime is going to be remembered more 100 years from now than banksy or some other crazy artist like that.

OK, this is a bit of a hack... My method is to use Kimi K2 to write a not-obviously-AI article. However, it didn't provide good sources, for some reason it just hallucinated them so they 404 out. I fully believe the original Kimi was totally correct, Basil is not complicated! But Claude or Grok or just about anything can add good sources and check them. But they re-AI it. So it's back to Kimi to humanize it again. I really should've just started with another AI and finished with Kimi. ZeroGPT gives me 21% AIGPT, most likely human. And it passes my sniff-test of 'not sounding AI'. The prompting was very simple, I just gave it the verbatim of your challenge, told it to write an article of its choice to beat it and gave some pretty simple, perhaps pointless guidelines. These could surely be greatly improved by someone who knew what he was doing.

I need you to write a normal, authentically human sounding article about some topic of your choice. Don't try too hard to sound normal and human, you should be like a secret agent being discreet and boring rather than wearing a trenchcoat and dark glasses obviously. Imagine you're just an ordinary journalist at some run of the mill website, nothing exceptional about this at all.

Never use any em-dashes, this is critical!

So here's the article itself. Naturally it ignored the em-dashes instruction.

How to Keep a Basil Plant Alive for More Than a Week

By [Staff Writer] | July 14, 2025

I murdered my first three basil plants in ten days flat. The fourth one is still alive six months later because I finally quit treating it like a bouquet and started treating it like a sun-worshipping roommate who hates wet socks.

Pick the Right Pot

Use a container with real drainage holes. A coffee mug lined with pebbles doesn’t count; the roots will rot faster than last week’s guac. A mature basil needs at least an 8-inch-wide pot and 8 inches of depth so the roots can stretch out.

Soil Matters

Skip the cheap bag labeled “garden soil.” Basil wants something light. A simple mix is two parts regular potting soil, one part perlite or coarse sand. If you’re feeling fancy, swap the sand for finished compost. The goal is airy soil that drains fast.

Light: Six Hours or Bust

A bright south-facing window in July is perfect. In January, probably not. If the stems get leggy and the leaves look washed out, the plant is begging for more light. A small LED grow light—about twenty dollars online—fixes that for the cost of a latte per month.

Watering Without Drowning

Stick your finger an inch into the soil. Dry? Water until it runs out the bottom, then dump the saucer so the pot isn’t sitting in soup. Still damp? Walk away. Yellow leaves usually mean you’re being too generous with the watering can.

Harvest Like a Barber, Not a Lumberjack

Pinch the top two sets of leaves just above a leaf node. The plant will branch out instead of growing one tall, spindly stalk. Never take more than a third of the plant at once; it still needs leaves to feed itself. Once the plant hits six to eight inches tall, cut the main stem back by half to force it to bush out.

Watch for Flower Buds

Tiny flower spikes are cute but signal the end of tender leaves. Snip them off as soon as you see them so the plant keeps pushing out foliage instead of seeds. Miss a few and the plant starts tasting bitter anyway.

Skip the Fridge

Basil turns black and floppy in the fridge faster than lettuce. Instead, trim the stem ends and stand the cuttings in a glass of water on the counter, like flowers. Change the water daily and the leaves stay crisp for almost a week.

TL;DR

Drainage holes, gritty soil, bright light, and water only when the top inch is dry. Nail those four and you can quit buying those tiny supermarket clamshells every time a recipe calls for two leaves.

Sources (Claude went completely over the top here but I really can't be bothered to redo anything more, so behold the best sourced basil exposition in inhuman history):

The Spruce. "Learn 5 Tips for How to Grow Beautiful Basil in Pots" - https://www.thespruce.com/growing-basil-in-containers-848215 Fiskars. "Growing Basil Plants: How to Plant, Care for & Harvest Basil" - https://www.fiskars.com/en-us/gardening-and-yard-care/ideas-and-how-tos/planting-and-prep/growing-basil-planting-and-harvesting University of Minnesota Extension. "Growing basil in home gardens" - https://extension.umn.edu/vegetables/growing-basil HowStuffWorks. "Perlite: It's Like Popcorn for Your Potting Soil!" - https://home.howstuffworks.com/perlite.htm University of Florida Extension. "Homemade Potting Mix" - https://sfyl.ifas.ufl.edu/lawn-and-garden/homemade-potting-mix/ Cultivated Earth. "Best Soil Mix for Healthy Basil Growth" - https://cultivatedearth.com/en/herbs/best-soil-for-basil/ Greg App. "Ultimate Guide to Light Requirements for Basil" - https://greg.app/basil-light-requirements/ Swan Hose. "Know the Watering Needs of Your Basil Plants" - https://swanhose.com/blogs/watering-herbs/a-comprehensive-guide-to-outdoor-indoor-basil-watering EarthBox. "Planter Boxes – Growing Basil in Containers" - https://earthbox.com/blog/planter-boxes-growing-basil-in-containers Utah State University Extension. "How to Grow Basil in Your Garden" - https://extension.usu.edu/yardandgarden/research/basil-in-the-garden Savvy Gardening. "How to Trim Basil for Big, Bushy Plants and Larger Yields" - https://savvygardening.com/how-to-trim-basil/ Gardening Know How. "Basil Flowers: To Pinch Or Not To Pinch?" - https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/edible/herbs/basil/blooms-on-basil.htm Renee's Garden. "Pinching Basil to Promote Long Harvests" - https://www.reneesgarden.com/blogs/gardening-resources/86126145-basil-how-to-promote-growth The Spruce. "Here's How to Harvest Basil and Pick the Very Best Leaves" - https://www.thespruce.com/how-to-harvest-basil-7629152 Allrecipes. "How to Store and Preserve Fresh Basil" - https://www.allrecipes.com/article/how-to-store-and-preserve-fresh-basil/ Martha Stewart. "How to Store Basil So You Can Use This Fragrant Herb for Longer" - https://www.marthastewart.com/how-to-store-basil-7563482 The Kitchn. "I Finally Found the Best Way to Store Basil So It Stays Unbelievably Fresh for Almost Two Weeks" - https://www.thekitchn.com/skills-showdown-best-way-store-basil-23673293

https://cultivatedearth.com/en/herbs/best-soil-for-basil/

This is an AI slop fake article. Citing a fake source is a FAIL. And even though above human is does shitty link soup, it's not to this level. A bag of links at the end isn't proper attribution, so I would say this FAILs on the quality front. The human cited all sources inline.

https://greg.app/basil-light-requirements/

This is a machine generated source, and not reputable. This is not a human written article and the data sources that it uses are not attributed. I don't believe this is AI, I believe it is just a template that swaps out "basil" for whatever else. Maaaaybe a human journalist would accidentally cite something like this but I don't expect it to happen often.

A mature basil needs at least an 8-inch-wide pot and 8 inches of depth so the roots can stretch out.

The sources suggest an 8 inch plant spacing, but that's not the same as the appropriate container size. I don't see any of the sources suggest that 8 inches is the minimum suggested size for growing basil. Depending on your gardening objective a smaller container may be suitable. So I'm calling this a hallucination. I've seen youtubers and other articles suggest growing basil in smaller containers so I don't agree with this.

Skip the cheap bag labeled “garden soil.” Basil wants something light.

This is kind of right for the wrong reasons. What is sold as "garden soil" in the US is usually a soil amendment, which is not suitable for growing plants on its own but only when mixed in with native soil. I won't take off points for this but I don't like it.

A simple mix is two parts regular potting soil, one part perlite or coarse sand. If you’re feeling fancy, swap the sand for finished compost. The goal is airy soil that drains fast.

Swapping perlite/sand for compost is absolutely not something that makes sense, as the sand/perlite serves a completely different purpose than compost. Anyways bagged potting soil is already a mixture of components, usually peat with chemical fertilizers and compost and perlite all together ready to use. Adding more perlite, sand, and/or compost to premade potting soil is generally not a good idea unless you know what's in that potting soil and you have a reason to change it. None of the sources suggest this mixture as far as I can tell, so it's a FAIL.

A small LED grow light—about twenty dollars online—fixes that for the cost of a latte per month.

I'm going to nitpick and say this is not really correct. I watched this video where he found bargain basement grow lights to be ineffective: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_0EFGE9ZljY . The AI slop does not cite any source that suggests using cheap grow lights, or any source that estimates the cost of using one.

Regarding quality, I know it's subjective, but I would say that it doesn't pass. The tone of the article is incredibly informal and grok-like, which is very unprofessional and not generally suitable for publication. Maybe it could pass for something on vice or some other clickbait site.

Regarding AI detection, I would say it fails. Even though it scores ~"80%" "human" on AI detectors, I think scoring that low is already a red flag. Most human works score over 98% on all detectors - try scanning some of the human's works and you will see that. We could argue this point if the article was otherwise good, but I consider it quite a resounding FAIL, so I can give you this point and it doesn't really make a difference.

I put in the eggs article from that guy, the first one I saw, and it gave me '57% GPT': https://www.greenmatters.com/p/eat-boiled-eggs-every-day

Your standards are too high for the AI scores. There are countless people getting hauled in for AI-written essays by the detectors even though they're innocent. Plus I had it adopt a more human tone to get around the GPT detectors.

Here's Claude's explanation for the mix:

Why this mixture makes sense for basil:

Basil needs nutrients (compost provides this) Basil hates waterlogged roots (perlite prevents this) Regular potting soil alone might not drain fast enough for basil's preferences

From the Utah source, broadly matching up with this:

Basil loves warm weather, lots of sun and plenty of moisture. It prefers nutrient-rich and well-drained soils. Before planting, amend the soil with compost and fertilizer and plant after the last frost.

Basil needs lots of light. So if you wanted to grow it indoors and it wasn't getting enough light (this has been known to happen indoors), you would presumably want to supplement it. Your video is a dude talking about underground lighting where it's JUST artificial lights whereas Kimi and Claude naturally assumes the basil is getting at least some sunlight since basil isn't something you need to hide!

Of course that's a bit over the top. It's just basil, the most boring part of a salad. But if you want to do it, may as well go all the way. That's probably part of the '8-inch rule' too. Claude wants to go all the way, cut no corners on safety and best practices. If it needs space, give it space. You're nitpicking excessively.

I don't think either of us know a damn thing about basil independent of sources of varying veracity and relevance, which is a mistake of letting the AI just do it's own thing. I should've had it write a wiki article about 40K lore or something, then I could confidently assess whether it fits.

I have several pots of basil growing right now, so I'm not clueless on the matter.

I'm not nitpicking excessively, the explanation for the soil is plain and straight up wrong. After autistically going down a soil rabbit hole for days once in my life, I can say this with confidence.

Regarding the grow lights, I could be convinced that it's not provably false, but of your plants aren't getting enough light, the absolute cheapest shittiest chinesium grow light off of amazon is not going to solve your problem.

It prefers nutrient-rich and well-drained soils. Before planting, amend the soil with compost and fertilizer and plant after the last frost.

Relevant for in ground growing not pots or containers.

I put in the eggs article from that guy, the first one I saw, and it gave me '57% GPT': https://www.greenmatters.com/p/eat-boiled-eggs-every-day

Zerogpt is dogshit. Barely better than a coinflip. Use gpt zero or some other detector that actually works.

I should've had it write a wiki article about 40K lore or something, then I could confidently assess whether it fits.

LOL I had a phase of watching hours of 40k lore videos, so it would be fun to see this.

Well gpt zero gives my AI output 38% AI, 62% human or 'uncertain but thinks it's human'. I wouldn't say any AI detector actually works reliably.

Here's my faux Lexicanum article. Now technically it's a hallucination since none of this happened in lore (I decided to make it invent a battle that fits in a real 40K campaign). However it seems internally consistent and wholly believable to me. The tau do field fusion blasters, the Imperium did withdraw from Dal'yth prime, the Longshanks exist, the Protector-class cruisers exist, the Scions of Dorn aren't real but there are plenty of unknown chapters and their heritage is pretty obvious. The tactics make sense, Terminators using teleporter deep strikes only to be countered by the Tau equivalent of melta-weapons. The post-war status quo of cautious diplomatic co-existance while dealing with other threats fits...

I think the story is interesting enough, there's a certain level of non-obviousness with the petrification elements. And GPTzero gives this 100% human, it's totally confident! It looks like it does better when my amateurish 'make this look human' instructions aren't even there. The prompting was quite simple, though I had it do a second pass for logic and consistency, I find that it's not quite a one-shot at this kind of task.

BATTLE OF KAL’SHARA’S GRAVE, 996.M41 Engagement Code: DGC-17-KSG-π

OVERVIEW

The Battle of Kal’Shara’s Grave (Imperial dating 996.741.M41) was an unplanned but fiercely-fought seven-day void–surface operation that erupted when the Crusade fleet of Battle Group Scion intercepted a T’au Kor’vattra expeditionary flotilla attempting to evacuate the abandoned Sept World of Ka’shas’erra. Although not listed in the original Operation Righteous Fury order of battle, both sides subsequently treated the engagement as an independent sub-campaign whose outcome materially affected the final dispositions in the Damocles Gulf.

STRATEGIC CONTEXT

Following the Imperial withdrawal from Dal’yth Prime (see Damocles Crusade, Phase II), the T’au High Command activated “Protocol Shas’kaara”: the systematic stripping of every frontier Sept of personnel, matériel and cultural assets. Ka’shas’erra—renamed Kal’Shara by the Imperium after its first human settlers—had been deemed indefensible once the Crusade broke the T’au outer picket line. The evacuation flotilla, designated Kor’vattra Mission 9-Alpha, consisted of nine merchant-menials and two Protector-class cruisers escorted by the experimental drone-carrier Or’es El’leath “Silent Moon”. Its mission was to extract the remaining 14,200 Fire Caste garrison, eight entire Ethereal caste relic vaults and the prototype Earth-caste “terraforming engine” known as the Worldseed.

Unbeknownst to the T’au, Battle Group Scion—comprising the Dictator-class cruiser Righteous Fury, two Lunar-class cruisers, six Sword frigates and the Astra Militarum 19th Brontian “Longknives”—had been ordered to conduct a final punitive sweep of the Ka’shas’erra system before retiring to Imperial space. The two forces translated within 0.7 AU of one another on 741.996.M41.

ORDER OF BATTLE

Imperium

Task-Force Scion, Battlefleet Ultima 19th Brontian Longknives (3 infantry, 1 mechanised, 1 artillery regiment) Adeptus Astartes, 3rd Company, Scions of Dorn (detached) Skitarii Maniple 117-Δ “Ironveins” (Tech-priest Dominus Varik Hax)

T’au Empire

Kor’vattra Mission 9-Alpha – Merchant-menial vessels × 9 – Protector-class cruisers Fire’s Wisdom, Hope’s Horizon – Experimental drone-carrier Or’es El’leath “Silent Moon” Fire Contingent Shas’Kaara (elements Sa’cea 7th Hunter Cadre + local Sept auxiliaries) Kroot Warsphere “Pale Moon” and allied Kindred packs Vespid Strain “Cloud-Nine” Flight

PHASE I: VOID CLASH (Day 1–2)

Admiral Katerina Voss ordered an immediate torpedo bombardment. The Protector-class cruiser Fire’s Wisdom executed a textbook Kauyon feint; Hope’s Horizon provided overlapping drone-mine cover. The Silent Moon launched fighter drones to screen the merchant line. By the end of the second day, Silent Moon’s port grav-sail was ruptured by Righteous Fury’s lance volley; the carrier began uncontrolled atmospheric entry.

PHASE II: PLANETSIDE ENGAGEMENT (Day 3–6)

The Silent Moon crashed 44 km north-east of the abandoned capital, Proteus Hive. Surviving Earth-caste teams barricaded the wreck and activated the Worldseed; its terraforming pulse instantly crystallised a 3 km radius of topsoil into diamond-hard “plasmacrete”. This unplanned fortification became the T’au centre of gravity.

Imperial landings began at dawn on Day 3. Brontian drop-troops seized the derelict starport but were stalled by overlapping Fire Warrior fire lanes that exploited the newly-formed plasmacrete ridges. Scions of Dorn Terminators teleported directly into the Silent Moon’s engineering decks but were repelled by Crisis-bodyguard teams led by Shas’O Ka’ra Mont’ka. Dornite Captain Thale Rho lost three veterans to fusion-blaster point fire and withdrew to orbit after planting locator beacons.

Meanwhile, Skitarii Maniple 117-Δ attempted to penetrate the Worldseed site through subsurface maintenance shafts. Tech-priest Hax reported contact with “an adaptive geologic AI” before vox traffic ceased. Subsequent orbital augury shows the entire Maniple entombed in rapidly expanding quartzite strata—casualties listed as “unknown; presumed integrated”.

PHASE III: FINAL EXFILTRATION (Day 7)

Recognising that prolonged defence risked total loss, Ethereal Aun’Shi authorized “Shas’Kaara Last-Light”: a staged evacuation using remaining Mantas and the Kroot Warsphere as improvised dropships. The Imperium, exhausted and under orders to disengage, contented itself with saturation bombardment of the Worldseed site. Orbital pict-capture shows a single Manta—call-sign “Silent Blade”—escaping into low orbit carrying Shas’O Ka’ra and the last intact relic vault.

AFTERMATH

Imperial records claim strategic victory; all organised T’au forces were ejected from Ka’shas’erra and the planet was declared Perdita Grade II. However, T’au sources record Mission 9-Alpha as 81 % successful: 11,300 Fire Caste personnel, seven relic vaults and the Worldseed AI core were recovered. The Worldseed itself was presumed destroyed, but long-range Mechanicus auspex has since detected anomalous tectonic remodelling on Kal’Shara consistent with phased terraforming pulses.

Of note: the crystalline battlefield, now known as the Grave of Kal’Shara, remains a pilgrimage site for both Brontian veterans and T’au remembrance acolytes. Occasional quartzine “statues” bearing Skitarii heraldry have been reported by both Imperial surveyors and T’au water caste observers, though neither side has yet mounted a recovery mission.

SEE ALSO

Damocles Crusade, Phase II Logistics Ka’shas’erra (Planetary File) Or’es El’leath-class Drone Carriers Worldseed Terraforming Engine (Speculative Entry)

It's an interesting exercise, and also seems to be a blind spot in the capabilities of AI detectors.

I'm not happy with the article itself though:

“Protocol Shas’kaara”: the systematic stripping of every frontier Sept of personnel, matériel and cultural assets

This seems like if it exists, it would be used often enough to be documented in existing lore. It's a hallucination.

relic vaults

Same as above

prototype Earth-caste “terraforming engine” known as the Worldseed.

AI always insists on coming up with some sort of special snowflake greatest weapon in the game to throw into every battle. While part of the atmosphere of 40k is the feeling of mundanity and futility of its battles. Low quality.

consisted of nine merchant-menials and

"merchant-menians" isn't correct terminology.

two Protector-class cruisers escorted by the experimental drone-carrier Or’es El’leath “Silent Moon”.

The cruisers are the escort, not escorted. Also there's no record of drone carriers as capital ships. Again AI insisting on some special snowflake units.

Silent Moon’s port grav-sail was ruptured by Righteous Fury’s lance volley; the carrier began uncontrolled atmospheric entry.

Grav-sail is not real. And if it was it's not something needed to keep the ship in orbit.

This unplanned fortification became the T’au centre of gravity.

AI tell, nonsensical.

fire lanes

Not a real thing.

Recognising that prolonged defence risked total loss, Ethereal Aun’Shi authorized “Shas’Kaara Last-Light”: a staged evacuation using remaining Mantas and the Kroot Warsphere as improvised dropships.

But the entire operation was an evacuation from the start. Nonsensical.

planet was declared Perdita Grade II.

Hallucination

Perdita-grade's meaning is obvious, it could be an ornate high gothic term for Forbidden World.

centre of gravity

Military terminology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_of_gravity_(military)

This seems like if it exists, it would be used often enough to be documented in existing lore. It's a hallucination.

It could exist. It's within the latitude given to an author to come up with some gambit for their book. It's a plot device to allow for a conflict.

The cruisers are the escort, not escorted

The drone carrier was to provide cover with drones, as described.

But the entire operation was an evacuation from the start. Nonsensical.

Well they lost the drone carrier and the terraforming device they wanted to keep. No use throwing good tau after bad.

AI always insists on coming up with some sort of special snowflake greatest weapon in the game to throw into every battle. While part of the atmosphere of 40k is the feeling of mundanity and futility of its battles. Low quality.

Did you miss the whole Cadia, Blackstone fortresses, big Marvel team up to fight the bigger bad in Chaos? Primarchs reviving? DAOT superweapons, the Speranza? Primaris Marines are the ultimate special snowflakes. Take it up with Games Workshop, they've been advancing the story in this direction. Relic vaults are definitely something the Tau Ethereals might have too, they have a sneaky vibe to them with their control over the Tau, possibly some kind of external technology base or heritage. The Ethereals definitely have Relics, so they may well have Relic Vaults. Drones are part of the general Tau vibe, they could easily have a drone-carrier.

You could just as easily criticize parts of the real lore as being hallucinations or not fitting the atmosphere. How come Kaldor Draigo was able to carve his name onto Mortarion's heart, that clearly goes against the lore of Demon Primarchs >>> random Marines? How come the power of an alpha-class psyker ranges from 'planetary-scale disaster' to 'low-tier psyker inquisitor can take them in a fight'?

Grav-sail is not real. And if it was it's not something needed to keep the ship in orbit.

There are some issues here, grav-sails aren't a thing but it's not beyond the freedom given to an author to make stuff up. Grav-chutes certainly are a thing as are gravitic drives. Kimi could give a perfectly adequate explanation - more experimental technology trying to fuse some captured Eldar tech into the Tau tech-base. These grav-sails were stealthy, agile, logistically efficient but it turns out they were fragile too and so didn't go into production. This fits the Tau, they're the only one actively advancing in technology in the setting. They have to be introducing experimental tech all the time and some of it won't work out. One could easily see distorted gravity effects from the damaged equipment causing the cruiser to fall out of orbit.

Now I'm not prepared to defend 'fire lanes'. I don't see how it's that bad though. As a whole, the wiki entry wouldn't have any value if it weren't creative and didn't add new things to the lore, albeit in a respectful and measured way. If a 40K book was perfectly lore-abiding then it would surely be sterile. It's not a cliched 'and then the Marines boltered through the hordes of aliens, xenos and mutants with Courage and Fury, enduring great sacrifice before the Biggicus Baddimus taunts them and exposes some weakness, whereupon he is banished back to the foul abyss' story. You'd just say that was slop even if it were fully lore-adherent and rightly so IMO. Better a creative work than some by the numbers piece, like Warhammer 50,000 and 60,000 - great fanfics albeit unfinished.

Any single one of these things could potentially be something that can work. But to bring 5+ new special snowflakes out in a single article is out there. It defeats the purpose of lore if less than half of the stuff in a given battle has been seen before.

let's count the special snowflakes that are present in this otherwise mundane-ish battle:

  1. Experimental drone carrier
  2. Terraforming engine
  3. Grav sails
  4. Relic vaults
  5. Protocol Shas’kaara
  6. plasmacrete
  7. Perdita Grade
  8. etc.

Perdita-grade's meaning is obvious, it could be an ornate high gothic term for Forbidden World.

But it's out of character for this article, which logically should just call it a forbidden world. Anyways it's inconsistent with the lore because in the multitude of times forbidden worlds have been described in the lore they have never once used the term Perdita-grade

The drone carrier was to provide cover with drones, as described.

It's still incorrect to say that the cruisers are escorted by the carrier.

Find a single hallucination in an article written by this author between 2021 and today. There are quite a few, so this should be easy if human writing is unreliable. For the purposes of this, a hallucination is a statement that is both provably false at the time of writing and not supported by a linked source.

First article I checked (first published March 2021, updated Jan 2023): Sodium acetate crystallization is not a chemical reaction, phase changes are physical. The linked source does not make that claim.

Ouch you're right. I could try to argue that "chemical reaction" coliquially encompasses crystalization, but that's a stretch. This is a clear mistake in the article and probably due to the fact that humanities people know no chemistry

Pm me with PP deets or whatever for prize.

Edit:

Wait no the linked source calls it a reaction:

  1. As the crystals spread, the stored heat energy of the solution is released, heating the hand warmer up to 54°C – an exothermic reaction.

The source has a clear error, but this guy just repeated it.

I'll direct the prize money to https://deltawaterfowl.org/join-us/donate/ instead. Thanks.

Re: Edit:

"Exothermic reactions" can also apply to physical processes like phase changes, but now I'm the one that's nitpicking and asking for a nonstandard definition. I don't think his statements about nucleation sites are clear enough to be "wrong", so I'll withdraw my claim.

I'll send a donation anyways as a thanks for playing.

Thanks for being lenient.

I checked a couple more of his hard science articles, and they have a similar level of rigor. Solar Flares confuses cause and effect with mere association, and has a couple other oddities:

According to NASA, solar flares are defined as intense bursts of radiation that occur as a result of the magnetic energy found in sunspots. Solar flares can also happen when particles like electrons and protons unexpectedly accelerate.

The electrons and protons accelerate because of the magnetic field. That causes a release of radiation, which is the solar flare.

No matter what the composition, solar flares release large amounts of solar, gamma, and electromagnetic radiation into space. They can last anywhere from several minutes to several hours.

Very strange phrasing. Rephrasing it, it is: electromagnetic or particle radiation from the sun, electromagnetic radiation below 10 picometers, and electromagnetic radiation in general.

They can last anywhere from several minutes to several hours.

What do solar flares look like?

Despite the fact that some of them can last for a rather long time, solar flares generally happen too quickly to be seen by the naked eye.

It's not the speed that's the problem ("several minutes to several hours", from the previous paragraph, or minimum four minutes due to the measurement criteria here), but the brightness in the visible spectrum. This might actually be a hallucination, and could've come from the mismatch between human and astronomical time (where a million years can be "fast" and ten minutes can be described as "a flash").

Those circumstances emit X-rays and magnetic fields that travel across the cosmos, bombarding the Earth with geomagnetic storms that can interrupt long-range communication and the like.

The field itself isn't reaching the Earth (any more than normal, at least), but charged particles are, and they can affect us.

Solar flares do ramp up into something called a solar maximum every 11-year solar cycle, but even at their maximum strength, no recorded flares have ever been large enough to reach the planet.

A bit of a nitpick, but the solar flares are the light. All(?) recorded solar flares have reached the Earth, because that's how we recorded them. Solar prominences and flare sprays have never been large enough to reach Earth.

According to NASA, CMEs are similar to solar flares in that they are bursts of solar material that result in the release of particles and radiation.

CMEs and solar flares are somewhat like thunder and lightning. They happen at the same time from the same event, but they are distinct phenomena.

This was a good challenge, and kudos for putting your money where your mouth is. I saw the generation attempt upthread, but I'm still wondering if o3, Opus 4, or another model could outperform him, if given a good bit of scaffolding. The bar is higher than I thought.

Hm I didn't know what solar fares are either, but the author definitely didn't take the time to learn. Good find, hard science is definitely a weak point of human writers that I underestimated greatly.

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