We like reading stories on Reddit, sometimes. Since the advent of large language models, people have posted more and more AI-generated stories. Here is how to identify them.

This is a draft. Come back later for the final version.

In our method, there are three steps to detecting AI slop on Reddit.

First, AI-generated stories have a smell. With some experience, you start noticing that smell. These stories are usually bland and generic. Humans put all kinds of quirky details in their stories, and in AI stories there is little of that. Also, the stories are often slightly improbable in terms of behaviours described in them. You read them, and think “what?”

The second step is very easy. You check how old the poster’s account is. The vast majority of stinking stories are posted from new accounts, less than a month old.

The third step is to put the suspicious story in an AI-text detector. We use Pangram. Note that there are no 100% accurate detectors, and there cannot be. The only reliable way to detect AI writing is if it was watermarked, and the only ones who can watermark are model providers. This means that for general public there is simply no reliable way to tell. However, if you don’t instruct a chatbot to write in a specific way, it writes in its default style, which does have tells. Some say Pangram has high precision, meaning that if it says it’s AI, it’s probably AI.

The next time you read a story that feels off, check the poster’s account, and if it’s new, put the text in a detector. It is amazing how many of the popular stories with hundreds and thousands of upvotes are AI-generated.