Why AI Writing Still Reads Like Slop — Louis-François Bouchard, Towards AI

Louis-François Bouchard of Towards AI breaks down what makes AI writing feel like slop: overused words, vague generalities, saying nothing, repetition, hallucination and a voice that sounds like everyone at once. He then shows how his team built a benchmark to measure whether a model can write a video script in his own voice: 10 scripts, 5 drafts per model, 4 LLM judges, nine scoring metrics and 1,000 human A/B checks. He shares what it cost, why judges favor their own model family, and practical tips for writing with AI: very long prompts full of examples, one review pass from a strong model, many cheap drafts merged together, and always a human edit. Chapters: - 00:00 What is slop? - 02:41 Measuring sloppy writing - 03:49 Why build another benchmark - 05:44 Can a model write like me? - 07:19 10 scripts, 5 drafts, 4 judges - 09:14 What gets measured - 11:10 How the judges score - 12:38 Judges prefer their own models - 13:46 Human A/B checks - 14:15 What it cost - 15:20 What we learned - 16:21 How to write better with AI Louis-François Bouchard, Towards AI: https://towardsai.net Join us in SF for the second annual AIE CODE summit: https://aie.codes our last flagship summit of 2026. Applications live now!