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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   6778 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026

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You say this isn't an example of ai writing but I noticed a few very significant tells of AI slop. I won't harp on the section formatting and random inclusion of a table because those aren't necessarily bad things, but a few of these paragraphs engage in possibly the single thing I hate most about AI writing: the tendency to tack on vacuous, unnecessary, self-congratulatory statements at the end of paragraphs. For example:

It's a good demonstration of how the sheriff/police division isn't just historical trivia; it determines, very concretely, who is politically on the hook when something goes wrong.

... If it's such a good demonstration, the reader should already have concluded that from reading it. Cut!

American law enforcement, in other words, is a braid of at least three lineages — feudal county sheriff, urban professional police, and Southern slave-patrol/frontier policing — not one clean line.

Again, this should be obvious from the rest of the paragraph. Cut!

I won't go so far as to directly accuse you of composing this essay wholly with AI, but it is definitely AI inflected in that it contains a lot of information that is likely true but not necessarily interesting for humans. A good essayist should prioritize. You spend about as long talking about the etymology of the word sheriff as you spend talking about the history and effectiveness of london's municipal police department, and as a consequence completely gloss over the historical sources actually relevant for demonstrating your central point.

As a maxim: develop taste. Keep ONLY the delicious bits and spit the rest out.

Sure glad the mods are banning all the lamers posting their own thoughts about current events so that we can have a steady stream of lengthy slop-pieces to read!

I don't think the clanker problem is quite so bad yet that we need affirmative action policing for humans.

Yet- growth mindset!

I share @jkf 's annoyance with a couple of the recent bans. Fine, they weren't great posts and I get the motivation of the "no boo outgroup" rule, but i dislike the side effect of incentivizing main thread submissions to be A Manifesto.

You say this isn't an example of AI writing

I won't go so far as to directly accuse you of composing this essay wholly with AI

No, he said:

not one-shotted into an LLM

I endorse this essay

I worked on this.

I interpret those statements as meaning that the comment is wholly LLM-written, but the result of multiple rounds of "working on" prompts rather than a single "one-shot" prompt, especially since "endorsing" something is basically an explicit statement that the endorser didn't write it himself.

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