38 AI Slop Words to Ban in 2026 + Free Checklist

What is AI slop?

AI slop is the collection of filler words, generic phrases, and corporate-speak that large language models default to when they don't have strong enough constraints. Words like "delve", "leverage", and "cutting-edge" are dead giveaways that a message was AI-generated.

The problem? Your prospects have seen thousands of these messages. Their brain pattern-matches it as spam in under 2 seconds. Your reply rate drops to near zero.

The full list: 38 words to ban immediately

We analyzed over 50,000 AI-generated cold emails to find the words that appear 10x more in AI output vs. human-written copy. Here are the worst offenders:

Why do AI models use these words?

Large language models were trained on billions of corporate documents, press releases, and marketing copy. These words appear disproportionately in that training data. Without explicit constraints, the model defaults to what it saw most often in "professional" contexts.

The fix isn't to tell the AI "don't use these words." That barely works. The fix is to architect the entire prompt so the model has no room to slip into corporate-speak. That's exactly what Crompty's Anti-Slop Engine does.

How to check your own copy

1. Copy your most recent cold email or LinkedIn message
2. Ctrl+F for each word in the ban list above
3. If you find 3+ matches, your message will likely be flagged as AI-generated
4. Rewrite using specific, concrete language instead

What to use instead

The faster way: let Crompty handle it

Instead of manually auditing every message, you can use Crompty's prompt architect to generate prompts that are pre-filtered against all 38 slop words. The v3 engine bakes the ban list directly into the prompt structure so the AI never has the chance to use them.

Sources & methodology

Word frequency analysis based on 50,000+ AI-generated cold emails collected between Jan-Mar 2026 vs. a control set of 10,000 human-written outreach messages. Slop score calculated as the ratio of AI vs. human usage frequency per word.