# Slop-marker convention

> The inverted convention — declaring *human* authorship rather than machine — is [[human-made-disclosure]], argued for in [[no-ai-statements]]. Same structural move, opposite claim, and a different incentive problem: a slop marker costs the producer something to attach, a human-made marker is free to fake.

A slop marker is an explicit signal a producer attaches to an artifact to declare that it wasn't made for unwitting human consumption. The canonical proposal is William Woodruff's [[readme-not|READMENOT]] file, but the concept is name-agnostic: any consistent marker (a file, a header, an `@generated`-style comment) that lets a reader make an informed decision before spending attention on machine output.

## The definition that makes it work

The marker is only coherent if "slop" is defined by *how the artifact was produced*, not by *how it reads*. Woodruff's two sufficient conditions: an artifact is slop if it either (1) was developed primarily without human supervision, or (2) reflects a fundamental lack of operator understanding. Neither is visible from the surface — which is exactly why a marker is needed. You can't reliably detect slop by reading it (see [[credibility-as-slop-test]]: fluent LLM output looks like effort that never happened, and a single em dash can get careful writing dismissed as slop). If detection worked, no marker would be necessary.

## Why production-process, not surface

This is the load-bearing move. Surface-based slop detection fails in both directions, so any convention built on "does it look like slop" is doomed. A marker sidesteps detection entirely by moving the declaration to the one party who actually knows the production process — the author. It's the same structural answer as the [[credibility-as-slop-test]] (author stakes their name) and the human-sized-artifact countermeasure in [[agent-principal-agent-problem]] (force a small thing a human vouches for): when the signal can't be recovered from the output, you have to get it from the producer.

## The precedent

Generated code already has this: the `@generated` marker (and tools like linters/review bots that skip such files). Nobody objects to generated code existing; the friction is reading it unaware. Slop is the same category one level up — machine-produced artifacts where the honest move is to flag provenance so readers opt in knowingly. The marker doesn't say "never read this"; it says "here's what you're getting into." Security research is the standard reason to read flagged slop anyway.

## Limits

- **It's voluntary and honest-system.** It helps people who *want* to signal honestly; it does nothing about slop dumped without a marker, which is most of it. The value is giving honest producers a way to express intent, not enforcing disclosure.
- **The target moves.** "2026's slop is not 2025's slop." As models improve, the line drifts, so a marker is a point-in-time claim, not a permanent verdict.
- **It presumes the producer can tell.** Same objection raised against the [[credibility-as-slop-test]]: if LLM output is uniformly average, an author acclimated to that average may not recognize their own artifact as slop.

Related: [[llm-as-average-democratizer]] (why the effort-signal collapsed in the first place), [[cult-of-vibe-coding]], [[reviewing-ai-code]] (provenance changes how you should review).