The dashes became a running joke among my colleagues, and my editors kept asking me to go easier on them. Bear in mind that was before AI was a thing and, therefore, before em dashes became the signal for “a chatbot wrote this.”<\/p>
So when AI writing took over the world, I had to let go of my beloved em dash so I wouldn’t sound like a chatbot. I mean, I never did sound like one (I think!), but an untrained eye might have thought so.<\/p>
Cut to a few years later. Now I use AI every day to help me write the tutorials and blog posts for Hostinger, and along the way I’ve come to think that much of what we call AI slop started as nothing more than human habits, like my dashes. AI just has all of these habits at once, and none of the reasons behind them. That’s what slop is to me: writing on autopilot, where nobody decides which ones actually belong.<\/p>
Writing, after all, is thinking<\/em> before it’s anything else. And as much as AI can help me plan, research, draft, and correct, it shouldn’t replace my thinking; when it does, it shows up on the page.<\/p> This very piece you’re reading was written with AI’s help. And I’ll show you exactly where that help lands.<\/p> To be clear, my dashes were never the problem per se. I had a reason for each one, even the ones my editors cut. In Portuguese, the em dash, called travessão, is everyday punctuation for dialogue and asides, so mine came with the language.<\/p> A habit is a move you keep making because it worked before, long after you’ve stopped checking whether it fits. AI picked up thousands of ours from the writing it learned from, and it reaches for them by default, without asking whether the sentence in front of it needs them. That’s when a habit turns into slop.<\/p> Openings are a good example of this lack of judgment. Brazilian journalists have a name for an intro that circles its subject before landing on it: nariz de cera<\/a>, or wax nose. Folha de S.Paulo, one of Brazil’s most influential newspapers, calls it a sign of wordiness that has no place in journalism. It wasn’t always considered bad writing, though: for decades, it was simply how Brazilian newspapers opened a story, until the lead took its place in the 1950s.<\/p> I asked several of my journalism professors why it’s called that, and none of them could fully explain it. The best guess I’ve found since is that a nose made of wax has nothing holding it up, just like a story with no lead.<\/p> In my experience, an AI intro written without guidance is a wax nose more often than not: a paragraph on why the topic matters before the topic shows up.<\/p> (If you noticed this article’s first line clears its throat a little: guilty. I kept it on purpose, because it’s the one throat-clear in here with a reason. It tells you a person is talking, and a wordy one at that.)<\/p> Endings have their own version. When I wrote about the AI to-do assistant our Head of Content built<\/a>, the AI draft closed on her line about time, then added one more: “And her assistant still hasn’t sent a single message. That’s the point.”<\/p> Ana Hercigonja Galić, one of my editors at Hostinger, who reviewed the piece, suggested cutting it, and she was right: the quote had already done the work and had its weight to close the story. The extra line only told readers how to feel about it. A punchline to close a paragraph works in an op-ed, but after a quote that already lands, it’s one line too many.<\/p> The correction runs the other way, too. AI does three things better than me: keeping things short, polishing my English, and turning a vague idea into a concrete one.<\/p> I tend to write more than I need to express my point, and AI is good at suggesting shorter versions that readers can get through quickly. That matters a lot when they come to a tutorial to get something done.<\/p> Graciliano Ramos, one of Brazil’s great writers and a newspaperman himself, had a rule for this. “One should write the way the washerwomen of Alagoas do their work,” he said in a 1948 interview. “They wet the clothes, wring them, soap them, and wring them again until not a single drop falls.”<\/p> “Words weren’t made to decorate, to shine like fake gold,” he went on. “Words were made to say.” (The translation is mine.) That’s a job AI and I now share: sometimes it wrings out my drafts, and sometimes I wring out its.<\/p> The best example of the two working together came from that to-do assistant piece. Our Head of Content’s two AI assistants can’t talk to each other directly, so they pass notes through a shared Google Doc. My draft said something like “colleagues working from very different places.” The AI tightened it to “coworkers who sit on different floors.”<\/p> The idea was mine, but AI made it concrete.<\/p> I didn’t plan this piece alone. Before writing a word, I asked my AI assistant to interview me about how I write with AI. It asked one question at a time and followed my answers wherever they went, rather than sticking to its list, just like a journalist would.<\/p> It was a good interviewer. When I told it about my em dashes at MacMagazine, it answered with three words: “That’s your hook.” It was right. It compared AI drafts of my published pieces with the final versions and asked which changes were mine. When I sent it the slides of a workshop I gave my team in Vilnius last year, it spotted nariz de cera<\/em> in the transcript, garbled by the transcription tool, and asked me whether that’s what I’d said.<\/p> It also got things wrong. It first pitched this article as an editor’s guide to spotting slop. “I’m not an editor, I’m a writer,” I told it. It also dated the term at 70 years old with total confidence. According to media historian Cristiane Costa<\/a>, the wax nose was already the norm in Brazilian newspapers in the 1920s, so the habit is at least a century old.<\/p> Halfway through our interview, I warned it that AI tends to be too literal and not very subtle, and that any idea I gave it would come back a bit too in-your-face. It agreed and suggested leaving the lines that matter most to me. That’s why the first and last lines of this article are completely mine, while the rest is a mix.<\/p> Here’s how AI suggested the opening of this article:<\/p>Slop is a habit without a reason<\/h2>
What AI does better than me<\/h2>
This article had an interviewer<\/h2>
![\"AI](\"https:\/\/imagedelivery.net\/LqiWLm-3MGbYHtFuUbcBtA\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2026\/11\/ai-suggested-opening.png\/public\")