“It’s AI slop,” Doug said, without hesitation, but with a trace of fear.

He’d seen the phrase tossed around in the Reddit threads he followed. AI slop was the new shorthand for any piece of modern writing that felt off. Bloated. Predictable. Sanitized. Or maybe from a jealous reader. You saw it in Amazon reviews like a stamp, This is AI slop. Don’t bother.

It wasn’t a critique. It was an execution.

Doug dismissed the style.

“Look at the em dashes and the way the tone swings negative,” he said, holding his phone out. “It reads like ChatGPT.”

Tess slid closer on the couch. Doug pointed to the section he meant, the part about the layoffs and the seven tech companies. It wasn’t wrong, exactly. But it had that tone. That clean, polished, context-aware rhythm that never quite earned its confidence.

Tess re-read at the paragraph, then nodded slightly.

She knew. She absolutely knew.

She was living in the minefield every day. At the college, nothing was clear. No campus-wide policy, no ethical guidelines. Just rumors and half-statements passed around in department meetings.

Some professors had gone scorched earth and run everything through the filters, fail anything under 75% human. No negotiation. No grace.

Others tried to work with it. Blend it. Teach their students how to use it without becoming it.

Tess hadn’t picked a side. Not fully. She still marked up papers by hand. Still circled lazy sentences. But more and more, she was marking structure.

She pointed to the sentence Doug was referring to.

“This one here,” she said. “‘Not governments. Not voters.’ That’s classic corrective contrast. It’s not X, it’s Y. It’s quintessential ChatGPT”.

Doug nodded.

“It’s the pivot,” Tess said. “Sets you up, then flips it. ChatGPT does it constantly. It feels decisive. But it’s just a pattern.”

“And the em dashes?” Doug asked. “Only AI uses those, not a student in your university would know how to use one properly. Ain’t no one there James Baldwin.”

“Cover for voice,” she said. “When the AI doesn’t know how to keep tone consistent, it leans on punctuation to hold the sentence together.”

Doug smirked. “So your student fed it a prompt?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe she wrote it. Maybe she wrote with it. That’s what’s hard. Is it cheating?”