No 2025 HN thread is complete without someone accusing someone else of using AI or someone using the word "slop".
Bullet points? Must be AI. Em-dash? Obviously slop. Not only this, but that? Holy moly, AI slop.
(we ignore whether or not the writing is actually interesting, engaging, educational, etc. of course)
As someone who often wrote with bullet points, emoticons, some extra formatting, or dashes - albeit using the hyphen (incorrectly, I've learned) and not the em- - (:P) some LLM-generated text uses these things very liberally and much differently than most people did before. I didn't always have reactions like this, but after being baited by enough garbage search engine results and the like, I'm now often put off very quickly after noticing these patterns. And frankly, seeing it just makes it not feel worth it to continue reading and try to guess at what the person's actual ideas and thoughts are.
Folks should be disclosing when they're using AI to write articles. AI style is garbage. It not only pollutes the internet but will steadily infect the writing style of others.