How to Passive-Aggressively Shame People Who Use LLMs Selfishly

Too many slop grenades these days.
LLMs are cool and all, but does every Slack message need to be a
bulleted list where the first sentence of each item is bold?

I recently read one too many blog posts with the phrase, “it’s
not X, it’s Y” as a one-line paragraph and finally snapped.
It is now my life’s mission to purge selfish LLM usage from the
internet.

Define “selfish”

Selfish LLM usage: A situation in which someone uses an
LLM to save their own time at the expense of other people’s
time, resulting in a net productivity loss.

Opinions vary on the usefulness of LLMs, but hopefully we can
all agree that using them selfishly is cringe.

Nevertheless, people use AI selfishly all the time. This is not
surprising: many people are under heavy time pressure and some
people aren’t even aware they’re doing it. But the world would
be a better place if people stopped.

But it’s not polite to call someone out for blatantly using AI
when their brain would have sufficed. The trick is subtlety. I
propose a method of subtly shaming people with plausible
deniability:

1. Secretly make fun of people via emojis
2. Other things (less fun)

Dog whistle emojis

React to suspected AI content with an emoji that only makes
sense to likeminded people. Here are some ideas with variously
intense connotations:

Passive-aggressive emojis

Respond to selfish AI-generated content with these emojis if you
want to keep a low profile while secretly making fun of the
author.

Fully aggressive emojis

If you don’t mind being fired and/or punched in the face,
respond to slop with the following emojis:

Positive emojis

Reward human effort with compliment emojis:

Emojis don’t cut deep enough

I admit the dog whistle emoji thing is at least 20% sarcastic.

If you want to be less culty, probably the most neutral and
unambiguous emoji is robot face 🤖.

Semi-jokes aside, here are some better things you can do to
shape the world to your liking:

Positive reinforcement

If someone sends rough (but clearly human) thoughts, engage with
it positively. Be extra nice and chill.

Force the author to engage with their slop

Ask genuine questions that force the slop
author to reflect on what they
produced and answer directly from their human brain. The
questions should be short and simple. Match the author’s effort
level.

• How did you come up with this idea?
• I really liked [interesting detail], how did you learn to
  [verb] like that?

Epmathy

Keep in mind that the average person over-relying on AI for
common tasks is potentially under immense time pressure and/or
sufficiently out of their depth that they lack the ability to
distinguish good from bad content. They almost certainly are not
using AI out of malice.

Establish social norms

Turns out the average person does not like slop, so it’s not
hard to ringlead your friends into improving the situation.

For example, my software engineering team at work has been
fatigued by AI writing cluttering up our pull requests, so we
added a temporary PR checklist to help us get in the habit of
making the code easier to review:

## PR Checklist



- [ ] Description is human-written, concise, and useful



- [ ] Screenshot/video attached for frontend changes, or real
      examples of backend behavior
- [ ] Code comments on tricky parts are human-written and
      concise (no AI wall of text)
- [ ] Tests verify important functionality and are
      straightforward (not brittle, noisy, implementation-quirk
      tests)



- [ ] Assumptions, weak points, follow up, and open questions
      called out
- [ ] GitHub comments signpost areas most important to the
      reviewer
- [ ] Scope is as narrow as it reasonably can be (or noted why
      it isn't split)

This also led to me creating a
comment guard script for Claude Code,
which prevents comments longer than two lines long. Highly
recommend.

Conclusion

When discussing this post please include 🏺