Slop/Counterslop

As of 7/21, Substack has a Pangram integration to scan for how much of a post is written by AI.

You can use it on the web from the Substack inbox. Click on a post, hit the 3 dots:

And voila:

Well done David.

Pangram is capable of false positives, but I ran it on both posts I published this week and it was accurate. One was 100% human and one it said 20% AI and 8% AI-assisted which sounds about right (my Thursday post included synopsis bullet points from my Scale notes).

I subscribe to 140 substacks. I don’t miss a word of about 5% of them. Another 10% there’s a decent chance I’ll read, and then there’s a steep falloff. Many of these emails have instrumental value that is going unmined.

[I should probably unsubscribe to the ones I ignore, but I’m not an inbox zero guy. Gmail search is solid and with the Claude-Gmail connector being an email bloodhound, organizing mail is a waste of time.]

I have scheduled jobs that “read” every distribution I’m on. One of my side projects is operationalizing this intake to get value out of this material (I’m into another phase of this which I’ll write about eventually). Running the Panagram scanner on a sample of the emails I read this week…well, let’s just say a lot of what’s out here is 100% AI-generated. I don’t agree that 100% AI means slop since I see posts from insightful people who I don’t think would write at all if it meant a lot more work than massaging a robot to wordsmith your thoughts. I wouldn’t call them writers, but I might still want the info. I actually think they should lean into their non-writer-but-have-something-to share-status. Dump your prompt in the post and move on. If the AI can write your post, my AI can read it. I don’t need you to bother. I don’t want to read it if I can’t feel anything, and I cannot feel anything from what a robot wrote.

Adam Mastroianni explained it well:

Words themselves don’t contain feelings—they are a recipe for creating that feeling inside your own head, to assemble the right set of emotions out of the experiences you have at hand. If I do a good job, the subjective experience that results inside you might resemble the one that originated inside me, but it will never be identical, because we’re working with different ingredients.

The computer doesn’t know any of this. It can’t know any of this. It can only read the cookbook; it can’t taste the meal. Objective knowledge can make your sentences true, but it can’t make them alive.

If it’s not obvious, only people who care about writing itself as an act of expression will be left writing without AI. Writing will be seen as an act of arrogance. A sense that your point-of-view is worth transmitting personally because the unique way it travels is itself part of the message. I will be clinging to self-importance thank you very much.

In Socrates 2026, I had this non-sequitur:

I spent over an hour walking through the local hills while talking to ChatGPT’s voice functionality Thursday evening. It was the easiest way to think through a large automation project. I won’t discuss the project yet but the sense I had while architecting it with ChatGPT was a new one. It was the feeling I know some friends had about 8 months ago and a smaller group of people (but not a tiny group) had 18 months ago and so on. A tiny group had the feeling a decade ago.

I suspect one’s appreciation for the feeling would be correlated to whatever innate ability one would have for chess even if they never played chess. I know I couldn’t have had the feeling much earlier. I just can’t see enough steps ahead. I can only fathom a little bit of abstraction before my mind begs for a physical demonstration of possibility.

The feeling is that much of what you do is nothing but a loop. Once you see the loop well enough to label its parts, you lose something. Mystery. There’s just less mystery about routine. I wouldn’t have thought anything we called “routine” had mystery in the first place, until that was the thing I felt disappeared. I admit, losing some mystery cost a sense of ego. And yet that feeling was totally overwhelmed by a different mystery. The one the techies and rationalist types have been going on about. “What’s coming next?”

We just finished watching the Mandalorian series. I know, I know. The kids were not interested years ago, so we tried again. In the final season, there’s a utopian city run by Jack Black and Lizzo that is captive to the droids who serve it. Automation has led to Brave New World levels of learned, almost embraced, helplessness. They get bailed out by Din Djarin and Bo-Katan Kryze, which undermines the society’s cautionary tale potential, but alas, Disney. Instead, the city is held up as a UBI-paradise where citizens are freed from scarcity to indulge their passions.

I personally don’t believe UBI can be sold to Americans en masse unless it is imposed from the kind of authoritarian control that we have thus far resisted. Thus far. We’re supposed to be the pole that rejects the social credit score for safety bargain. Our culture (again, thus far) is imprinted with the knowledge that UBI is incoherent because our spirits are blind to whether competition is for physical or positional scarcity. We know better than to “exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?”

If we are not on our knees, UBI may come anyway but in disguise. TBTF equity markets, voluntarily scrolling ourselves into the Matrix, or whatever the grade inflation version of employment is, financed by literal inflation.

I only say these things to acknowledge the singularity backdrop of anything pertaining to our industrial future. I am not dismissing them. I have no clue what’s coming. But my feeling is I won’t recognize the way I worked for much of my adult life in the same way that a recent grad would not recognize the White Pages (yes, there used to be a list of landlines alphabetized by last name for everyone in your town).

I don’t feel a sense of doom but a feeling that technology will free us from the least human parts of our work. If you wonder how, it ties back to the beginning of this 100% organic post. The world we’re heading into will elevate reading because what will remain of human writing, the writing that is actually read by humans, will have no reason to exist other than its humanity.

That metaphor will apply everywhere.

I’m hopeful that we will look back at the past 10-20 years as the terrible twos of a connected world. A transition marked by phone-neck and expectations running ahead of reality. But if our anxiety is peaking just before reality gets significantly better, that would make perfect sense.

Every generation believes it lives in interesting times. It sure beats apathy.

Counterslop

Peter Yang shared his “No AI slop” skill which you can just tell your LLM to ingest.

https://github.com/petergyang/no-ai-slop/blob/main/SKILL.md

Major Ralph and Sam checking into work energy: