No Slop, Please

My kids are working on essays for school this week, and I was curious how they'd go about it. They use AI all the time for research, so I assumed the first move would be to ask it for an outline and take it from there. That's not what happened. Both of them sat down and wrote the whole thing themselves. They didn't use AI for the outline, didn't use it for a first draft, and didn't even use it to polish the final version.

I asked each of them why, and their answers were identical. Authenticity seemed to be high on their list of things they feel AI does not get, and both of them used the word slop. That stopped me. At work, more and more of the documents I read are clearly written by AI, and honestly, most of them are insufferable. Somewhere along the way, a lot of us decided that the writing is the part worth handing off. My kids have drawn the line in a completely different place. AI is welcome to help them find things. The thinking, and the words that carry it, they want to keep for themselves. I think they're right.