Stop accusing people of cheating with LLMs

This is a bonus post for the week, because I’m frustrated and mad. Recently on lobste.rs, someone posted that they had taken down an article they had written because someone else had accused them of using an LLM to write it. The original author posted that they did not use an LLM, that the bogus accusation was from someone that they really looked up to and respected, and they were feeling really hurt, frustrated, and confused.

And look. I know AI slop is a thing, and it’s really tiring to wade through. But accusing other random people on the Internet of cheating (because let’s be real, that’s what you’re doing) isn’t going to solve the AI slop problem. All it’s going to do is make real people hurt, upset, and angry. I say this as a person with relatively thick skin, as someone who doesn’t much care what other randos on the Internet think about my writing, and (also) as someone who doesn’t use LLMs to write on this blog, like, at all. I’m pretty solidly in the “AI;DR” (Artificial Intelligence; Didn’t Read) camp, or in other words, “If you can’t be arsed to write it, I can’t be arsed to read it”.

But I also say this as someone who got one of his blog posts labeled as “hot garbage” by some random Redditor because they thought it was AI slop, and honestly? It kinda stung. My coping mechanism was to take that Redditor to task, both on Reddit, and also somewhat mercilessly on here. You can argue about whether that was helpful or not (probably not) but if you’re going to throw around false accusations about my writing you can bet I’m not going to take that lying down.

There are lots of arguments people make as to why “labelling things as AI slop is good, actually,” and I recognize that I’m not going to change anybody’s mind on this blog post, but I feel like deconstructing some of them anyways:

1. “I don’t want to read AI slop, and I don’t think other people want to read it either, so I’m doing a public service!” Ok, I’m sure you think your AI slop detector is the most refined slop detector and you never have any false positives, but I guarantee you that you’re wrong. One thing that LLMs are good at is pretending to be human, and regardless of whether they will ever be useful, they will definitely get better at pretending to be a human. So I know you think your list of tells (em-dashes, bullet points, “it’s not X, it’s Y”) is better than everyone else’s list of tells, but sooner or later you’re going to get one wrong, and when you do the person on the other end is going to be hurt and frustrated.

2. “Yea, you’re right, I’m going to get some things wrong, but this is a war against Big AI! There’s going to be some casualties!”1 OK, look, putting aside the violent rhetoric, which clearly doesn’t help anybody, the way you “win” your “war” against “Big AI” is by embracing the actual humanity in each of us. We need communities who can come together and support each other and elevate the actual humanness on the Internet. When you come in and start tossing “This is just AI slop hot garbage” bombs all over the place, you’re actually HELPING your perceived enemies, by dividing the communities you should be supporting.

3. “Some people don’t realize that LLMs are bad, and I’m just educating them. I’m doing a public service!” Same comment as (1). Your LLM detector isn’t as good as you think it is. Also this one has an extra layer of elitism and superiority: even if you “get it right” and the target of your critique used an LLM, all you’re doing is announcing that you’re better than them, under a very thin veneer of “just trying to help.”

4. “People just need to have thicker skin; if you can’t handle criticism on the Internet, you shouldn’t be posting stuff for people to read.” Ah yes, my favorite, the drive-by victim blame: “It’s your fault that other people are assholes.” Are we really still doing this in 2026?

5. “This is exactly why we need humans.json!” I am happy to support efforts to re-build the “small web” or use a “web of trust” or whatever else—I do think those things are interesting—but proposing them as a solution to LLM slop is looking for a technical solution to a human problem, which is always the wrong way to go about things. How exactly will this weird, niche technology that most people won’t even know about stop people from making false accusations about AI slop?

6. “Everyone should just put a banner at the top of their website saying that the content is AI-free!” This is a great combination of victim-blaming and naive solutions. For one: why should I have to modify my behaviour because other people are assholes? For two: if this becomes normalized (and I’m already seeing it in quite a few places), the “bad actors” are just going to start putting “This is human-generated” at the top of all their posts, and instead of throwing around accusations about AI slop, we’re just going to start throwing around accusations of “lying and AI slop”. How is that better?

Anyways, a while back I read The AI Con by Emily Bender and Alex Hanna, because I’d heard a lot of good things about it. Unfortunately, I came away from that book profoundly disappointed. One of the key takeaways from that book was “make fun of people who use AI”, and, excuse me, but what???? This is the definition of “punching down”, and it leads to exactly the situation we’re in today, where Internet randos get accused by other Internet randos of doing things they didn’t do, with real impacts to the mental health and physical well-being of everyone involved2.

And look, I get it. AI sucks. The hype is exhausting. There are real, serious, extremely troubling implications with the technology. The rhetoric from the “other side” is over-the-top, overblown, and seems to “demand a response”. But if your response is to shame and make fun of internet bystanders, you can GTFO.

~drmorr

1

Think this language is an exaggeration? No, you’re wrong, I’ve seen people say exactly this on the internet.

2

By all means, go ahead and continue making fun of the billionaires and (ugh) trillionaires peddling this nonsense, though.