Anytime I see “this is not just x, it’s y” i can almost guarantee with high degree of confidence that slop was used.

As someone from outside the Anglophone cultural sphere, when I first learned to write in English, the kind of writing that AI now often produces was taught to me as “formal" writing.

But these days, when I write in that formal style, people sometimes say it sounds like AI. That has been a difficult and frustrating point for me.

I still find the subtle difference hard to understand.

I was raised and educated well inside the Anglosphere (USA) and was also taught to write formally in that way.

Do the people who say you sound like AI give you any specifics?

Also, if you don't mind, what was your English education like? I understand that quite a few Americans work in South Korea as teachers but I have no details about how that manifests.

That used to happen to me more often. When I first came to HN, and even now if I am not careful, my comments can get flagged. Also, when I translate from Korean using DeepL and paste the result, people often say it sounds flagged, awkward, or unnatural. I studied English more seriously in graduate school, although I dropped out. In Korea, there are quite a few Americans who teach English. Public schools often have native English-speaking instructors, but in my case I learned English more seriously at graduate school, and universities also make students study English almost semi-compulsorily.

In Seoul, there are probably many teachers who mainly teach middle and high school students, but a lot of that is through private education rather than the public school system.

I'm still pissed that I had to practice removing that from my writing habits. I liked that device, dammit!

It's not just AI-generated, it's also slop!