Slop is slop.
Claude watermarks its text now. Substack scores yours for AI.
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Happy Tuesday,
Before we dive into the episode, I’ve been looking at your survey results on what you want FullStack HR to be this fall - thanks to all who filled out the form!
First, it’s clear that most of you want practical, tangible stuff. AI tools and prompts that you can use directly- I will do my utmost to provide that, keeping the same cadence as before summer and sending those practical updates out on Saturdays.
Secondly, you also want news and trends. To accommodate that, what I will trial is a monthly update here on FullStack HR, live. I will do three and then evaluate, turn out, etc.
The first one will be next Friday at 3 PM CET / 9 AM EST. You will need to be a subscriber to watch it, and I will send out the invite shortly.
Thirdly, real cases from other companies. This is in the making, and I’ve recorded two podcast episodes with, in my view, insanely interesting podcast guests who do stuff. Not talking about “AI this and I that”; these are people who are experimenting and driving AI forward in their respective companies.
I will post the first episodes in the newsletter, but make sure you hit the follow button either on Spotify or Apple Podcasts - I can guarantee that you don’t want to miss the episodes!
Are YOU doing interesting stuff with AI and want to be on the podcast? Reach out!
Ambitions are high for the fall, and I hope you’ll tag along!
All that said, let’s get to it.
I’ve been slow for a couple of weeks. I wrote all summer and needed two weeks off to gather my thoughts. Instead, I discussed…this topic. A lot of conversations, most of them circling the same thing. Human writing versus AI slop.
The debate got new fuel on August 14, when Anthropic started watermarking everything Claude writes. It’s an invisible signature built on Google DeepMind’s SynthID approach, where the model’s word choices get nudged into a pattern a detector can read later. Anthropic rolled it out globally to meet the EU AI Act. Some people say they’ve already reverse-engineered it and can strip it out.
I’m not so sure. It also isn’t the point.
Substack shipped its version of the same idea in July. Any reader can hit the three dots on a post and see what percentage Pangram thinks is AI-assisted. I have my objections to Pangram, but they seem to do a decent job. (With emphasis on decent.)
So we have watermarks on one side, detectors on the other, and a long argument about transparency in between. My question is simpler. Why do we care?
And I’ve landed on the idea that I don’t care whether a human or a machine produced the slop. I care that it’s slop.
I use AI constantly. To gather my thoughts, to get new ones, to summarize what I already think, to challenge it. That’s where the value sits for me.
I have also let AI write entire pieces on its own. Those tanked. You could tell immediately. Not thought through. But I’ve written pieces with no AI anywhere near them that got exactly the same response. Rushed. Boring. Is this even true? Same verdict, no machine involved.
The problem was never the tool. It was me not thinking hard enough.
Which brings me to how I made this piece. I dictate in the car, then I let Claude or ChatGPT turn the dictation into an article. I’ve worked this way for years. The thoughts are mine, the detours are mine, the chain of thought you can hear on the podcast version is mine. I have no idea what Pangram makes of this particular text, and I don’t care. Sure, it’s sometimes a bit off, and I’m guessing that it will flag this as partly AI-generated, which it is. I mean, AI wrote this, but the thoughts and the rambles are mine. (As you can hear in the podcast version.)
It is what it is, but the part of the Substack feature I like is the box next to the score, “How I make this,” where you write your own explanation of how you use AI. That turns a verdict into something you can learn from, and there’s plenty to learn from how other people work.
What puzzles me is the off switch. You can disable scanning on your posts, and readers get “AI detection unavailable” instead of a number. I see creators I’m fairly sure use AI turning it off. For me, that reads as shame or uncertainty.
Say it instead! I use AI here; here is where, here is how.
That’s a better post than the one you’re protecting.
So the summary for me is, don’t be afraid to use AI in your writing.
I’d prefer you did, if it makes the piece better. Get good at prompting. Get good at making your point land. Own the result, and be open about how you got there.
If what comes out is sloppy, that’s not the AI.
That’s you not having thought it through.