What's this about?
Wharton professor Ethan Mollick read one of the viral "anti-slop" markdown files people feed their agents (instruction files promising to eliminate generic AI writing) and found it was itself ~100% AI-written — and will "hyperstition your outputs into mega-slop." His advice: develop taste, or hire someone with it, and write your own instructions.
What exactly is "slop"?
Slop is low-quality, generic AI-generated content — technically fluent, substantively empty. The irony he's flagging: people copy-paste a viral AI-written file to fight AI genericness, which just launders one model's clichés into everyone's outputs. "Hyperstition" is the sci-fi term for a fiction that makes itself true — here, slop instructions breeding sloppier outputs.
What's the community saying?
572 likes among the practitioner crowd
- Consensus that quality instructions must come from human editorial judgment — echoing trq212's "thin skills" and the day's broader taste-over-templates theme.
- Pushback: not everyone can hire taste; some AI-drafted-human-edited middle ground is fine.