A lot of what we call AI slop is AI being smarter than us

It's funny how much time people spend asking when AI is going to become smarter than people.

In a lot of ways, it already is significantly smarter than the average person. And some of what we call "AI slop" is actually evidence of that.

Take the phrase "smoke test." I've heard people say no real developer talks like that. But I remember the first developer I heard use it. His name was Todd, and at the time he was the best developer I'd ever worked with. Shout out to Todd.

It wasn't an AI phrase. It was a phrase used by a caliber of developer most people hadn't worked with.

Same with "load-bearing." Same with em dashes. Em dashes are good. They're grammatically useful and they look better. AI uses them because they're often the right punctuation for the sentence.

But most of us never learned to use them, so now correct usage looks alien enough to be an AI tell.

Some AI slop is real. There are cadences and filler phrases that models repeat until everything sounds the same.

But some of what gets called AI slop is the exact opposite. The model learned language from people who were more literate, or terminology from practitioners who were better than the ones we happen to know.

It's not revealing that AI is dumb. It's revealing how much human slop we've gotten used to.