Too many slop grenades these days. LLMs are cool and all, but does every Slack message need to be a bulleted list where the first sentence of each item is bold?
I recently read one too many blog posts with the phrase, “it’s not X, it’s Y” as a one-line paragraph and finally snapped. It is now my life’s mission to purge selfish LLM usage from the internet.
Define “selfish”
Selfish LLM usage: A situation in which someone uses an LLM to save their own time at the expense of other people’s time, resulting in a net productivity loss.
Opinions vary on the usefulness of LLMs, but hopefully we can all agree that using them selfishly is cringe.
Nevertheless, people use AI selfishly all the time. This is not surprising: many people are under heavy time pressure and some people aren’t even aware they’re doing it. But the world would be a better place if people stopped.
But it’s not polite to call someone out for blatantly using AI when their brain would have sufficed. The trick is subtlety. I propose a method of subtly shaming people with plausible deniability:
- Secretly make fun of people via emojis
- Other things (less fun)
Dog whistle emojis
React to suspected AI content with an emoji that only makes sense to likeminded people. Here are some ideas with variously intense connotations:
Passive-aggressive emojis
Respond to selfish AI-generated content with these emojis if you want to keep a low profile while secretly making fun of the author.
| Emoji | Emoji name | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 🏺 | Amphora (Ancient Greek vase) | I randomly wanted to remind you of the incredible art humanity produced with their bare hands thousands of years ago |
| 📎 | Paperclip | Clippy |
| ➖ | Heavy minus sign | Em dash |
| 〰️ | Wavy dash | Em dash (less obvious) |
| ✍️ | Writing hand | Wow this is really good writing that you definitely wrote yourself with your human brain and human hands |
| 🎰 | Slot machine | You kept prompting the LLM until your post was almost coherent |
| 🧨 | Firecracker | Slop grenade |
| 🦾 | Mechanical arm | Very cool but the machine gets credit, not you |
| 🧱 | Brick Wall | Wow, that’s a lot of text |
| 🐋 | Whale | Wow, that’s a LOT of text |
| 🔄♐ | Counterclockwise arrows button + Sagittarius | Reverse centaur |
| 💙 | Blue heart | Corporate AI slop |
Fully aggressive emojis
If you don’t mind being fired and/or punched in the face, respond to slop with the following emojis:
| Emoji | Emoji name | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 🩼 | Crutch | You aren’t capable of writing even the most basic of messages without help |
| | Splat | Slop. Use with caution (potential sexual harassment) |
| 🪣 | Bucket | For putting the slop in |
| 🚱 | Non-potable water | You just vaporized a small country’s water supply |
| 🚷 | No pedestrians | No humans were involved in the making of this content |
| 📜 | Scroll | BIG message |
| 🦜 | Parrot | Stochastic parrot |
| ✨ | Sparkle | The universal symbol for AI content |
| ☣️ | Biohazard | This content is harmful to human existence |
Positive emojis
Reward human effort with compliment emojis:
| Emoji | Emoji name | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 🧠 | Brain | A human brain was used |
| 🎨 | Palette | Fine art |
| 🍞 | Bread | Homemade content, smells nice |
| 💚 | Green heart | I love this human content (certified organic™) |
| 💪 | Flexed arm | The opposite of 🦾, human effort à la John Henry |
| | Fingerprint | Evidence of human |
| 🏺 | Amphora (Ancient Greek vase) | Authentic human art that will stand for millennia |
Yes, the amphora emoji is also on the passive-aggressive list because irony, but obviously it works for human content too. By reacting to both kinds of content with it, you gain plausible deniability while still subliminally encouraging people to think about the importance of humanity and artistic expression.
Emojis don’t cut deep enough
I admit the dog whistle emoji thing is at least 20% sarcastic.
If you want to be less culty, probably the most neutral and unambiguous emoji is robot face 🤖.
Semi-jokes aside, here are some better things you can do to shape the world to your liking:
Positive reinforcement
If someone sends rough (but clearly human) thoughts, engage with it positively. Be extra nice and chill.
Ask genuine questions that force the slop author to reflect on what they produced and answer directly from their human brain. The questions should be short and simple. Match the author’s effort level.
Slauthor?
- How did you come up with this idea?
- I really liked [interesting detail], how did you learn to [verb] like that?
Epmathy
I spelled this heading exactly as intended.
Keep in mind that the average person over-relying on AI for common tasks is potentially under immense time pressure and/or sufficiently out of their depth that they lack the ability to distinguish good from bad content. They almost certainly are not using AI out of malice.
Turns out the average person does not like slop, so it’s not hard to ringlead your friends into improving the situation.
For example, my software engineering team at work has been fatigued by AI writing cluttering up our pull requests, so we added a temporary PR checklist to help us get in the habit of making the code easier to review:
## PR Checklist
<!-- All PRs -->
- [ ] Description is human-written, concise, and useful
<!-- Medium complexity PRs also include -->
- [ ] Screenshot/video attached for frontend changes, or real
examples of backend behavior
- [ ] Code comments on tricky parts are human-written and
concise (no AI wall of text)
- [ ] Tests verify important functionality and are
straightforward (not brittle, noisy, implementation-quirk
tests)
<!-- Large / risky PRs also include -->
- [ ] Assumptions, weak points, follow up, and open questions
called out
- [ ] GitHub comments signpost areas most important to the
reviewer
- [ ] Scope is as narrow as it reasonably can be (or noted why
it isn't split)This also led to me creating a comment guard script for Claude Code, which prevents comments longer than two lines long. Highly recommend.
Conclusion
When discussing this post please include 🏺