When I was in my 20s in the early 2000s, using online-dating websites to find a partner carried social stigma and was something to hide. It was the last resort for desperate people. “Normal” people were meeting potential mates in bars and clubs. Fast-forward 20 years, and it’s quite the opposite. Flirting in real life is kinda creepy: “use Tinder, please.”

I think we are in the same online dating stigma stage with AI. There is an element of shame if the text gives away that it was AI-generated. If you spot certain words like “crucial” or an em dash “—”, there is an urge to rewrite and hide that. The implication is that there is a limit to how much you can scale with AI if the user needs to be in the loop all the time, to sanitize and de-AI-fy the result.

I wonder if, at some point, people will ignore the shame and fully embrace the slop.