The rise of commercial artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Claude, etc. has brought with it a great temptation. The immense data centers that power them give them useful – in most cases – data identification, collection, and analysis capabilities. This tempts people to use them as “all-knowing assistants”, who can provide answers to just about everything, quickly and reliably. Well, not always reliably, but I’ll get to that later.

With generative AI, people have become increasingly tempted to replace actual human skills with computer-generated content – sometimes mimicking specific styles. This has resulted in a flood of what’s now known as “AI slop”, which is plagued by all sorts of aesthetic and even factual discrepancies. This is even worse with AI-generated texts, especially analyses, essays, articles, etc. Although, by now, more experienced readers have learned to identify AI-generated texts and images quite well, many still slip through the cracks.