Researchers are trying to understand what "AI slop" is, a term for low-quality text made by computers. To figure it out, they asked experts like writers and scientists what makes writing feel "sloppy." They created a checklist with problems like being repetitive, irrelevant, factually wrong, or just using too many words to say very little. Then, they had professional editors use this checklist to mark sloppy parts in news articles and answers to questions. They found that while people sometimes disagree on whether a whole text is slop, they do agree on which specific parts are problems. The researchers also discovered that current computer programs and even other powerful models are not very good at finding slop on their own, meaning humans are still better at judging writing quality.
Northeastern University: Finding and Measuring AI Slop
Researchers defined what makes computer writing bad ("slop") and created a system to measure these problems.