How to Passive-Aggressively Shame People Who Use LLMs Selfishly

By Josh Moody — Published: Jun 23, 2026

Too many slop grenades these days. LLMs are cool and all, but does every Slack message need to be a bulleted list where the first sentence of each item is bold?

I recently read one too many blog posts with the phrase, “it’s not X, it’s Y” as a one-line paragraph and finally snapped. It is now my life’s mission to purge selfish LLM usage from the internet.

Define “selfish”

Selfish LLM usage: A situation in which someone uses an LLM to save their own time at the expense of other people’s time, resulting in a net productivity loss.

Opinions vary on the usefulness of LLMs, but hopefully we can all agree that using them selfishly is cringe.

Nevertheless, people use AI selfishly all the time. This is not surprising: many people are under heavy time pressure and some people aren’t even aware they’re doing it. But the world would be a better place if people stopped.

But it’s not polite to call someone out for blatantly using AI when their brain would have sufficed. The trick is subtlety. I propose a method of subtly shaming people with plausible deniability:

Secretly make fun of people via emojis

Other things (less fun)

Dog whistle emojis

React to suspected AI content with an emoji that only makes sense to likeminded people. Here are some ideas with variously intense connotations:

Passive-aggressive emojis

Respond to selfish AI-generated content with these emojis if you want to keep a low profile while secretly making fun of the author.

EmojiEmoji nameMeaning

🏺Amphora (Ancient Greek vase)I randomly wanted to remind you of the incredible art humanity produced with their bare hands thousands of years ago

📎PaperclipClippy

➖Heavy minus signEm dash

〰️Wavy dashEm dash (less obvious)

✍️Writing handWow this is really good writing that you definitely wrote yourself with your human brain and human hands

🎰Slot machineYou kept prompting the LLM until your post was almost coherent

🧨FirecrackerSlop grenade

🦾Mechanical armVery cool but the machine gets credit, not you

🧱Brick WallWow, that’s a lot of text

🐋WhaleWow, that’s a LOT of text

🔄♐Counterclockwise arrows button + SagittariusReverse centaur

💙Blue heartCorporate AI slop

Blue is typically considered a corporate, techie color

Fully aggressive emojis

If you don’t mind being fired and/or punched in the face, respond to slop with the following emojis:

EmojiEmoji nameMeaning

🩼CrutchYou aren’t capable of writing even the most basic of messages without help

🫟SplatSlop. Use with caution (potential sexual harassment)

🪣BucketFor putting the slop in

🚱Non-potable waterYou just vaporized a small country’s water supply

🚷No pedestriansNo humans were involved in the making of this content

📜ScrollBIG message

🦜ParrotStochastic parrot

✨SparkleThe universal symbol for AI content

☣️BiohazardThis content is harmful to human existence

Positive emojis

Reward human effort with compliment emojis:

EmojiEmoji nameMeaning

🧠BrainA human brain was used

🎨PaletteFine art

🍞BreadHomemade content, smells nice

💚Green heartI love this human content (certified organic™)

💪Flexed armThe opposite of 🦾, human effort à la John Henry

🫆FingerprintEvidence of human

🏺Amphora (Ancient Greek vase)Authentic human art that will stand for millennia

Yes, the amphora emoji is also on the passive-aggressive list because irony, but obviously it works for human content too. By reacting to both kinds of content with it, you gain plausible deniability while still subliminally encouraging people to think about the importance of humanity and artistic expression.

Emojis don’t cut deep enough

I admit the dog whistle emoji thing is at least 20% sarcastic.

If you want to be less culty, probably the most neutral and unambiguous emoji is robot face 🤖.

Semi-jokes aside, here are some better things you can do to shape the world to your liking:

Positive reinforcement

If someone sends rough (but clearly human) thoughts, engage with it positively. Be extra nice and chill.

Force the author to engage with their slop

Ask genuine questions that force the slop author to reflect on what they produced and answer directly from their human brain. The questions should be short and simple. Match the author’s effort level.

Slauthor?

How did you come up with this idea?

I really liked [interesting detail], how did you learn to [verb] like that?

Epmathy

I spelled this heading exactly as intended.

Keep in mind that the average person over-relying on AI for common tasks is potentially under immense time pressure and/or sufficiently out of their depth that they lack the ability to distinguish good from bad content. They almost certainly are not using AI out of malice.

Establish social norms

Turns out the average person does not like slop, so it’s not hard to ringlead your friends into improving the situation.

For example, my software engineering team at work has been fatigued by AI writing cluttering up our pull requests, so we added a temporary PR checklist to help us get in the habit of making the code easier to review:

PR Checklist

• [ ] Description is human-written, concise, and useful

• [ ] Screenshot/video attached for frontend changes, or real

examples of backend behavior

• [ ] Code comments on tricky parts are human-written and

concise (no AI wall of text)

• [ ] Tests verify important functionality and are

straightforward (not brittle, noisy, implementation-quirk tests)

• [ ] Assumptions, weak points, follow up, and open questions

called out

• [ ] GitHub comments signpost areas most important to the

reviewer

• [ ] Scope is as narrow as it reasonably can be (or noted why

it isn't split)

This also led to me creating a comment guard script for Claude Code, which prevents comments longer than two lines long. Highly recommend.

Conclusion

When discussing this post please include 🏺