Last year, The Economist named “AI Slop” as its 2025 word of the year. “Slop merchants clog up the internet with drivel,” it wrote. Search Google for a health question and you’ll find endless articles filled with AI-written drivel. Scroll through Instagram and it won’t be long before you come across fake clips stitched together with an AI voice-over.
We’ve all seen it. AI slop is almost impossible to escape. And it stands to reason that being surrounded by it long enough, we’ll eventually begin to mimic it and start sounding like AI ourselves, much as spending a few weeks in a foreign country can subtly change the way you speak.
So recently, I decided to check my own writing. I put several articles into different AI-detection services and asked whether the writing was human or AI-generated. The results were interesting and somewhat gratifying (apparently, I’m still human). More importantly, they revealed some useful lessons about how we can communicate more effectively and distinctively in the age of AI slop.
Read widely and build your database of experiences
The first indication that my writing was human was specific domain expertise and synthesis. AI services try to mimic human writing by learning general patterns. What is harder to replicate is the ability to draw on specific knowledge and experiences from different domains and connect them in unexpected ways. That kind of synthesis is a hallmark of good human writing.
One of the things that creativity researchers have consistently found for decades is that expertise is absolutely essential for producing top-notch creative work, and it needs to be specific to a particular field or domain. The only way to build that kind of knowledge is by reading widely and learning through doing.
Performance expert Anders Ericsson studied expertise for decades and found that another important element is deliberate practice. You need to identify the components of a skill, get feedback, and deliberately work to improve your weak areas. This goes far beyond the pattern matching that AI does to learn a skill.
So probably the best way to avoid sounding—and thinking—like an AI is not to eliminate supposedly telltale signs like em dashes, but to build your human expertise by exposing yourself to the work of other humans while trying and failing to do things yourself. Those experiences become a database that is uniquely yours—and give you something worth sharing.
Be specific and personal
Many of the key strategies that AIs employ to sound human are very similar to how mentalists create the illusion of supernatural powers. They use general statements that encourage people to project their own ideas, feelings, and experiences onto whatever is being said, rather than leading the reader in a specific direction.
For example, Barnum statements are vague, highly general personality descriptions that people believe apply specifically to them, even though they could describe almost anyone. The rainbow ruse pairs a statement with its opposite, and subjective validation leverages the human tendency to map our specific real-world context onto general concepts.
For example, an AI might tell you that you are generally a private person, but around people you trust, you become outgoing (Barnum statement). You are a very kind and considerate person, but when somebody does something to break your trust, you feel deep-seated anger (rainbow ruse). And when you get into a conflict with someone close to you it drains your energy (subjective validation).
So another way to give your writing a more human feel is to offer specific, personal anecdotes about experiences you’ve had. Instead of the paragraph above, you might share a time when someone broke your trust, how it felt, and what you did about it. Explain specifically how the conflict drained your energy and what the consequences were.
The more concrete the experience, the less work you leave for the reader to do—and the more distinctly human your writing becomes.
Have an opinion
One of the things I’ve noticed when I use AI for editing is that it often tries to dial back my writing. AI is trained on a vast range of material and often gravitates toward safer, more generalized language. Humans, on the other hand, tend to form points of view that are tied to their own experiences and expertise. It’s a key component of how we form our identities.
It’s also what makes your writing interesting. As mathematician G. H. Hardy once put it, “It is not worth an intelligent man’s time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.” So make sure you are offering a distinctive point of view that takes a stand on an issue worth caring about.
AI hedges. People shouldn’t. There’s no point in writing to please everyone. If you have something important to say, there are always going to be people who won’t like it. They will likely say nasty things about you. If you build a significant platform, you will attract criticism, and some of it won’t be pleasant.
The only alternative is to be boring, which is what AI slop does. It offers generic information and advice that offends no one and is rarely very useful.
Be your own learning corpus
One way of looking at AI is that it consists of three components: compute, algorithms, and the learning corpus. Compute is all those chips in the data centers. Algorithms are the instructions embedded in the software. And the learning corpus is the body of material the system learns from.
When you use AI, the learning corpus is the most important thing you have control over. If, for example, you ask AI to give you answers from the broader internet, it will draw from everyone, no matter how smart or dumb. It will even learn from its own AI slop, leading to what experts call model collapse.
But if you control the material it works from, you can pick and choose the sources. So if you ask AI to write something for you, it will give you mostly slop. However, if you ask it to edit your own writing or summarize your own documents, it will do a much better job. It can also do a pretty good job transforming your thoughts from one form to another, such as creating a video script from a report that you wrote.
There are some things, however, that a machine will never do. A machine will never strike out in a Little League game, have its heart broken, or see its child born. Those personal experiences, perspectives, and insights are what you have to offer the world. They are also what AI can’t emulate without you.
In the age of AI, the best way to avoid sounding like a robot is to become more fully human.