We’re all overwhelmed by slop. Every inbox, every meeting, every conference talk comes with the same unspoken question: did a person actually write this?
The volume is the first problem. Generated text is cheap, so there is more of it: summaries nobody read before sending, posts that restate their own title, answers that sound authoritative and mean nothing. Reading used to imply that someone had done the work of writing. Increasingly it doesn’t.
The deeper problem is uncertainty. A reader facing a suspiciously fluent document has no way to tell what happened behind it. Was it drafted by the sender, generated wholesale, or something in between? The reader cannot know, and the sender often does not think to say.
What would change if people said
Much of the damage comes from silence, not from generation. A generated summary, declared as one, can be perfectly useful: the reader knows to treat it as a starting point. The same summary passed off as personal work costs the sender credibility when the truth comes out, and costs every future message the benefit of the doubt.
The fix is a statement of process, made before sending. Not a confession and not a boast — a description, the way a recipe describes how a dish was made. Human Quotient exists to make that description short and portable: a single number from 0 to 10 that says how much of the work was created directly by a person, from fully generated to fully direct.
Two boundaries matter. The score describes process, not quality — a generated summary can be excellent, and a hand-written memo can be wrong. And the score is not a self-description: in contexts where it matters, the score comes from the HQ service, which returns it with a signed token bound to the exact content that was scored. A number without verifiable backing is just a claim.
Slop is not primarily an aesthetics problem. It is a provenance problem. When the provenance of a text is stated and verifiable, readers can decide how much trust to extend — and most slop stops working, because slop depends on passing.
View the attestation options to see how a stated process travels with a piece of content.