AI-generated "slop" is everywhere — generic articles, hollow social clips, safe and forgettable prose. The danger isn't just reading it; it's absorbing its patterns until our own writing starts to sound the same way. Here's how to stay distinctly human.
1. Build a database of real experience
AI mimics general patterns. What it can't fake is deep, specific expertise pulled from lived experience and connected in surprising ways. Read widely, practice deliberately, and learn by doing — that's the only way to build a knowledge base that's genuinely yours.
2. Be specific and personal
Vague, flattering generalities (the kind mentalists and horoscopes use) feel personal because readers fill in the blanks themselves. Real humanity comes from concrete detail: a specific memory, a specific feeling, a specific outcome. The more concrete you are, the less interpretive work you leave for the reader — and the more human you sound.
3. Have an opinion
AI hedges toward safe, average language because it's trained to please everyone. People, by contrast, form opinions shaped by their own experience — and that's what makes writing worth reading. Taking a real stand means risking disagreement, even criticism. The alternative — inoffensive, forgettable content — is exactly what slop looks like.
4. Be your own learning corpus
AI is only as good as what it draws from. Let it work from the open internet and you get averaged-out mediocrity. Let it work from your writing, thoughts, and documents — editing, summarizing, reformatting — and it becomes a genuinely useful tool. Either way, the irreplaceable ingredient is you: your specific experiences, judgment, and point of view are the one input no model can generate on its own.
Bottom line: The fix for sounding like AI isn't policing surface tics like em dashes — it's doubling down on what makes you human: real expertise, real specificity, real opinions, and a body of original work only you could have produced.