slopscore-lint 0.7.2

Transparent AI-slop writing-pattern analysis for essays, blog posts, Markdown, JSON, and websites.

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.

⚠️ 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. Every point in the score comes from a visible rule with an evidence span.

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 point in the score 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 explain                               # what each of the 14 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: v0.7.0
    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

v0.7: 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