slopscore

A transparent linter for AI-slop writing patterns in essays, blog posts, Markdown, JSON, and websites.

slopscore reads text and returns a 0 to 100 SlopScore measuring the density of formulaic, generic, low-specificity, over-polished writing patterns associated with low-effort LLM output. It reports per-dimension scores and evidence spans (the exact phrases that triggered each finding), so you can see and fix what it flags.

Try it in your browser: slopscore.mountsilabs.com. Paste prose and get the score with evidence spans, no install.

⚠️ What slopscore is NOT

It does not detect whether text was written by AI, and must never be used to accuse a writer. It flags writing patterns in text (not authorship, not authors): patterns common in low-effort or AI-like prose and in plenty of human writing. Use it as a prose linter to nudge toward clearer, more specific writing, not as an AI detector. Authorship detectors are unreliable and biased; slopscore deliberately is not one.

What it is, and what it is not

slopscore detects writing patterns, not authorship. It does not claim a text was written by AI, and it should never be used to accuse a writer. AI-authorship detectors are unreliable on short, edited, translated, and non-native-English text, so slopscore takes a more honest and more useful position:

"This text has a high concentration of generic, formulaic, low-evidence writing patterns."

not

"This was written by AI."

Think of it as a linter for slop, closer to Vale or ruff than to a black-box AI detector. Rule-driven dimensions carry an evidence span for every hit. Four statistical dimensions (genericity, cadence, redundancy, and the human-signal counterweight) carry no spans; they are low-weighted and never corroborate a weak tell.

Install

pip install slopscore-lint            # lean, rule-based core
pip install "slopscore-lint[web]"     # + website extraction (trafilatura)
pip install "slopscore-lint[nlp]"     # + spaCy NER and sentence-transformer embeddings
pip install "slopscore-lint[lang]"    # + non-English language detection
pip install "slopscore-lint[report]"  # + HTML report rendering (Jinja2)
pip install "slopscore-lint[all]"     # everything

Name note: the PyPI package is slopscore-lint (plain slopscore belongs to a different tool). The import stays import slopscore, and the command is slopscore-lint.

Quickstart

pip install slopscore-lint
slopscore-lint scan post.md

SlopScore 100.0/100 (severe)   110 words   profile blog   strictness conservative

Evidence (26 findings; each line has a char offset, severity, and explanation):
   54  SIGNIF_STANDS_AS_TESTAMENT  high    "stands as a testament"
   91  PARALLEL_ITS_NOT_ITS        medium  "It is not just a tool, it is"
  138  LEXICAL_MARKETING_UPLIFT    medium  "empowers"
  152  WEASEL_EXPERTS_ARGUE        medium  "Experts argue"

Every finding traces to a rule and the span that triggered it. scan returns exit code 1 when findings reach the --fail-on threshold, so it drops into CI unchanged:

slopscore-lint scan post.md --fail-on high   # exit 1 on the sample above; 0 when clean

Short text (under ~100 words) and non-English input abstain from a confident label by design.

Usage

slopscore-lint scan post.md
slopscore-lint scan essay.txt --format json
slopscore-lint scan content.json --json-path "$.article.body"
slopscore-lint scan https://example.com/post        # requires slopscore-lint[web]
slopscore-lint scan src/app.py                       # lints docstring/comment prose, ignores code
slopscore-lint scan post.md --by-paragraph           # surfaces a sloppy section in a clean doc
slopscore-lint scan draft.md --suggest               # adds advisory rewrite suggestions
slopscore-lint scan essay.md --broad                 # opt-in tier: rationalist jargon + bare weasel words
slopscore-lint explain                               # what each of the 16 dimensions detects

Lint the prose inside code

scan reads the natural-language prose out of source files (Python docstrings and comments, JS/TS JSDoc) and ignores the code itself, so it catches slop in documentation that code linters skip:

slopscore-lint scan src/                  --recursive   # docstrings + comments across a package
slopscore-lint scan README.md CHANGELOG.md --fail-on high

Audit fairness

slopscore reports how often each rule fires on competent plain and non-native English, the writing that pattern detectors are known to over-flag. No other slop linter publishes this:

slopscore-lint fairness        # per-rule false-positive rate on the plain/ESL benchmark slices

Calibrate against your own writing

Instead of asking "does this look like AI?", ask "does this deviate from my usual style in sloppy ways?". Build a baseline from a folder of your past writing, then compare new drafts to it:

slopscore-lint calibrate ./my-old-posts --name me
slopscore-lint scan new-post.md --baseline me     # reports per-dimension z-score deviations

Higher-precision syntactic detection (optional)

The default install detects syntactic tells (trailing "-ing" analyses, and so on) with regex. Install the [nlp] extra and the spaCy English model for a higher-precision, lower-false-positive path:

pip install "slopscore-lint[nlp]"
python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm

slopscore auto-upgrades to the spaCy path when the model is present; nothing else changes.

Use it in CI

Gate prose like any other linter. Exit codes: 0 clean (or below --fail-on), 1 findings at or above the threshold, 2 usage error, 3 a needed extra is missing.

slopscore-lint scan ./content --recursive --fail-on high          # exit 1 if any high finding
slopscore-lint scan . --diff origin/main --fail-on medium         # only files changed vs a ref
slopscore-lint scan ./content --recursive --format sarif -o out.sarif   # for GitHub code scanning
slopscore-lint scan post.md --format html -o report.html          # highlighted-span HTML (needs [report])

pre-commit (.pre-commit-config.yaml):

repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/jman4162/slopscore
    rev: v0.10.0
    hooks:
      - id: slopscore-lint
        args: ["--fail-on", "high"]

GitHub Action (.github/workflows/prose.yml) scans on every pull request and uploads findings to code scanning. security-events: write is required while upload-sarif is on (its default); set upload-sarif: false to drop it.

name: prose
on: [pull_request]
permissions:
  contents: read
  security-events: write
jobs:
  slopscore:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: jman4162/slopscore@v0
        with:
          files: ./content
          profile: blog
          fail-on: high

Adopt on an existing repo

Record the current findings as a baseline, commit it, then fail CI only on new findings so a backlog does not block the first run:

slopscore-lint baseline ./content --recursive -o .slopscore-baseline.json
git add .slopscore-baseline.json && git commit -m "slopscore baseline"
slopscore-lint scan ./content --recursive --baseline-file .slopscore-baseline.json --fail-on-new

Configure

Settings live in slopscore.toml or a [tool.slopscore] table in pyproject.toml. CLI flags win over the file. Run slopscore-lint config to print the effective settings.

# slopscore.toml
profile = "technical"
strictness = "conservative"
disabled_rules = ["RESIDUE_CODE_FENCE"]
rule_severity = { COPULA_SERVES_AS = "low" }
suggest = false

disabled_rules and rule_severity take effect everywhere. For a one-off false positive in a Markdown, plain-text, or reStructuredText file, an inline comment also works:

<!-- slopscore-disable-next-line SIGNIF_STANDS_AS_TESTAMENT -->
The museum stands as a testament to the city's history.

--suggest adds advisory, non-destructive rewrite suggestions (it never edits files):

slopscore-lint scan draft.md --suggest --format json | jq '.evidence[] | select(.suggestion) | {span, fix: .suggestion.text}'
# {"span": "utilize", "fix": "use"}
# {"span": "in order to", "fix": "to"}

Python API

from slopscore import scan_text, scan_path

# the argument below is an example of the slop the tool flags:
report = scan_text("In today's fast-paced digital landscape, our platform empowers synergy.")
print(report.score.slop_score, report.score.label.value)   # 93.2 mild (short text abstains)
for e in report.evidence[:3]:
    print(e.rule_id, repr(e.span))

# batch a folder, skipping anything too short to judge:
from pathlib import Path
for f in Path("posts").glob("*.md"):
    r = scan_path(f)
    if not r.score.abstained and r.score.slop_score >= 50:
        print(f"{f.name}: {r.score.slop_score} {r.score.label.value}")

Status

v0.9: performative_candor, a third rule-driven axis after fake insight and fake evidence: points framed as difficult confessions ("I have to be honest", "truth be told"), sincerity adjectives on abstract nouns, and manufactured reluctance. Kept as its own dimension because its genre multipliers invert relative to insight_signaling. v0.9.2 hardened the GitHub Action against input injection, made --fail-on-new without a baseline a usage error, gave --diff a clean exit on a bad ref, stopped scoring GFM tables as prose, and added a Python matrix, an extras job, and a wheel-install smoke test to CI.

v0.8: insight_signaling for pseudo-profundity that announces insight rather than containing it ("load-bearing", "the crux of the issue", "pressure-test the claim"), with an opt-in --broad tier for rationalist jargon; the weasel dimension gained impersonal-passive attribution and unearned-certainty openers; slopscore-lint explain documents every rule.

v0.7: accuracy and robustness. Fixed a false "severe" on Markdown posts with code blocks (the code fences inflated prompt_residue when ingested as text). The [nlp] extra now genuinely upgrades two dimensions: spaCy named-entity density for genericity (benchmark AUROC 0.888 to 0.902) and sentence-transformer embeddings for rephrased redundancy, both validated to keep the fairness gate at 0% false positives on plain and non-native English. Added rhetorical question-and-answer scaffold detection and a slopscore-lint explain command. A sentence-length burstiness signal was tried and reverted for regressing the non-native slice.

v0.6: differentiation and reach. Lints the prose inside code (Python docstrings/comments, JS/TS JSDoc) so it catches slop that code linters skip; a fairness command that reports per-rule false-positive rates on plain and non-native English (no other slop linter publishes this); and --by-paragraph to surface a sloppy section inside an otherwise-clean document. Interpretable feature work (spaCy NER, semantic redundancy, burstiness) is on the v0.7 roadmap. Settled by evaluation: no model retrain and no gradient-boosting (XGBoost/LightGBM), since the held-out ceiling is set by features, not the model class, and trees break the numpy-only path and the fairness gate.

v0.5: a real slop-labeled benchmark (eval/datasets/benchmark.jsonl) with simple_english and non_native fairness slices, plus a held-out Wikipedia AI-Cleanup slice. Measured numbers in eval/RESULTS.md: strong on overt slop (PR-AUC 0.91), honestly weak on subtle real-world slop (held-out AUROC 0.69), which is why the accuracy claims stay modest.

v0.4: linter maturity. slopscore.toml / [tool.slopscore] config with per-rule toggles and severity overrides, inline <!-- slopscore-disable … --> suppression, a findings baseline (--fail-on-new), the implemented unsupported_claims dimension, opt-in --suggest rewrite suggestions (with SARIF fixes), an optional separate authorship-adapter interface (no detector bundled), PyPI packaging, and a docs site.

v0.3: an evaluation framework (slopscore-lint eval: TPR@FPR, PR-AUC, calibration, per-subgroup FPR) and a transparent learned scorer, a sign-constrained, calibrated logistic regression over the 13 dimensions, serialized as auditable JSON and run with pure numpy (--scorer ml). The rule scorer stays the default: under a replace-if-wins gate the learned model must beat it on held-out TPR@1%FPR without regressing subgroup false positives, and on the seed set it does not (it over-flags plain English). See MODEL_CARD.md and DATA_SOURCES.md.

v0.2.1: productionization. console/JSON/Markdown/SARIF/HTML reports, recursive and changed-files (--diff) batch scanning with CI exit codes, a GitHub Action, and a pre-commit hook.

v0.2: detection expansion grounded in Wikipedia's Signs of AI writing field guide. Dimensions: lexical markers, formulaic structure, significance inflation, superficial "-ing" analyses, vague or over-attribution, negative parallelism and rule-of-three, copula avoidance, genericity, redundancy, cadence, formatting tells, prompt residue, and a negative human-writing signal. Scoring is conservative by default: a corroboration gate damps weak-alone tells, and scores abstain on short or non-English input. See MODEL_CARD.md for citations and limitations.

License

MIT.

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