Observations on the world and its inhabitants
I had been working on slop. In previous work I found eleven patterns. Words, lists and stock phrases were caught by scripts. But something kept getting through. Text with no slop words still read like something delivered from a lectern, or as a report when none of that was required. This post will be of ...
Imagine it is 1989. I am sitting before an Amstrad PCW, a cream-coloured machine with a small green screen, a substantial keyboard and a three-inch floppy disk drive. When the disk is accessed, the machine whirs. When the printer begins, it clatters with mechanical determination. I do not think of it as a computer. People ...
You will probably read a few thousand words today if you’re surfing websites for news, opinion, advice, or reviews. Like you, most people will assume that a person wrote those articles. Until recently that assumption was safe. “Be very, very careful what you put in that head, because you will never, ever get it out.” ...
The Slop Sieve is an Python application that was developed as a defensive linguistic tool for writers like me, operating in an era of heightened AI surveillance. As algorithmic “detection” becomes more prevalent, writers who produce precise or rhythmic prose are increasingly at risk of being flagged as non-human. This project history documents the rationale, ...
