"It turns out, slop has a shape. And it’s the reason why AI generated writing sounds the way it does."

From The Digital Contrarian substack, June 16:

The Shape of Enshittification.
The Shape of Enshittification: Books That No Longer Get Read, An Internet That No Longer Gets Surfed, & The End of Social Media As We Know It... 

 

It turns out, slop has a shape.

And it’s the reason why AI generated writing sounds the way it does.

In a new study, a team of researchers at the University of Maryland and Google DeepMind ran an experiment.

They took 10,272 writing prompts and gave each one to a human author and to five AI models: Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Kimi.

They generated 61,608 stories, at around 5,000 words each.

Then, they looked at the underlying structure of each story: how the plot progresses, where the tension and conflict is placed, etc. etc.

And from that structure, they could identify a human-written story from AI-generated slop nearly 93% of the time.

 

What you’re seeing here in that image is the shape of AI Slop vs. Human Writing.

And there are five distinct ways that the shape of human writing is decidedly different from the so-called slop generated by today’s AI models:

1. AI over-explains its themes. (instead of letting readers infer)

2. Human writing is less linear. (more time-jumps and flashbacks.)

3. AI relies on bodily metaphors to explain emotion (81% vs. 38% human)

4. Humans reference specific texts, brands, places (nearly 2x the AI rate)

5. AI narrative is less diverse (fewer subplots and scenes, less dialogue)

And it’s the onslaught of AI writing that’s at least is partially responsible for….

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2 | Why Nothing Feels Real Anymore.....

....MUCH MORE 

Also at The Digital Contrarian: 

How to Go Viral on Substack (In 2026)
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