August 27th, 2025
This post is one of my advice & arguments pages about the harms and hazards of the AI Hype Movement.
One of the many negative effects of venture-capital-subsidized free text generation for everyone is that spammers use it to make ad revenue by putting up websites filled with AI-generated text. This shades into legitimate websites which use large language models (LLMs) to generate some of their content, and/or whose staff use LLMs as “assistants” and don’t check the results carefully enough. Poor quality information on the web was an annoyance before the advent of modern LLMs, but it has become a tsunami that overwhelms valid information to the point where the web can no longer be used to answer many questions reliably. The era of easy access to information via the web is ending, because there is so much hard-to-distinguish information-shaped text out there that actual information is hard to find, and it’s hard to even know the difference unless you’re already an expert. Here’s one example of that.
I wanted to find out how many calories are in poop. This seems like a question where the answer is definitely known to at least some scientists, and back in maybe 2015 I would have expected to find it easily with a quick web search. Today however, after wading through 5 separate results from the top to the bottom of the first page of results, every single one of them showed signs of AI authorship, so none of the info was trustworthy (several contradicted each other or themselves). The one article that cited legit sources didn’t include a straightforward answer to the question. Of course, I could dig past the first page, or look through the cited sources + do some math myself, and that’s not even that hard to do. But 10 years ago, a trustworthy answer would have been among the first 5 search results. When we say AI is destroying the digital commons, this is what we mean.
After posting this lament on social media, I decided to actually see what it would take to answer this question. I found my answer after maybe ~30 minutes of effort. First stop was the first search result on Startpage, which has some evidence of maybe-AI authorship but which is better than a lot of slop. It actually has real links & cites research, so I’ll start by looking at the sources. It claims near the top that poop contains 4.91 kcal per gram (note: 1 kcal = 1 Calorie = 1000 calories, which fact I could find/do trust despite the slop in that search). Now obviously, without a range or mention of an average, this isn’t the whole picture, but maybe it’s an average to start from? However, the citation link is to a small study on metabolism which only included 27 people with impaired glucose tolerance and obesity. Might have the cited stat, but it’s definitely not a broadly representative one if this is the source. The public abstract does not include the stat cited, and I don’t want to pay for the article. I happen to be affiliated with a university library, so I could see if I have access that way, but it’s a pain to do and not worth it for this study that I know is too specific. Also most people wouldn’t have access that way.
Side note: this doing-the-research protect has the nice benefit of letting you see lots of cool stuff you wouldn’t have otherwise. The abstract of this study is pretty cool and I learned a bit about gut microbiome changes from just reading the abstract.
My next move was to look among citations in this article to see if I could find something about calorie content of poop in general. Luckily the article page had indicators for which citations were free to access. I ended up reading/skimming 2 more articles (a few more interesting facts about gut microbiomes were learned) before finding this article whose introduction has what I’m looking for. Here’s the relevant paragraph:
The alteration of the energy-balance equation, which is defined by the equilibrium of energy intake and energy expenditure (1–5), leads to weight gain. One less-extensively-studied component of the energy-balance equation is energy loss in stools and urine. Previous studies of healthy adults showed that ≈5% of ingested calories were lost in stools and urine (6). Individuals who consume high-fiber diets exhibit a higher fecal energy loss than individuals who consume low-fiber diets with an equivalent energy content (7, 8). Webb and Annis (9) studied stool energy loss in 4 lean and 4 obese individuals and showed a tendency to lower the fecal energy excretion in obese compared with lean study participants.
And there’s a good-enough answer if we do some math, along with links to more in-depth reading if we want them. A Mayo clinic calorie calculator suggests about 2250 Calories per day for me to maintain my weight, I think there’s probably a lot of variation in that number, but 5% of that would be very roughly 100 Calories lost in poop per day, so maybe an extremely rough estimate for a range of humans might be 50-200 Calories per day. Interestingly, one of the AI slop pages I found asserted (without citation) 100-200 Calories per day, which kinda checks out. I had no way to trust that number though, and as we saw with the provenance of the 4.91 kcal/gram, it might not be good provenance.
To double-check, I visited this link from the paragraph above. It’s only a 6-person study, but just the abstract has numbers: ~250 kcal/day pooped on a low-fiber diet vs. ~400 kcal/day pooped on a high-fiber diet. That’s with intakes of ~2100 and ~2350 kcal respectively, which is close to the number from which I estimated 100 kcal above, so maybe the first estimate from just the 5% number was a bit low.
Glad those numbers were in the abstract, since the full text is paywalled… It’s possible this study was also done on some atypical patient group…
Just to come full circle, let’s look at that 4.91 kcal/gram number again. A search suggests 14-16 ounces of poop per day is typical, with at least two sources around 14 ounces, or ~400 grams. (AI slop was strong here too, with one including a completely made up table of “studies” that was summarized as 100-200 grams/day). If we believe 400 grams/day of poop, then 4.91 kcal/gram would be almost 2000 kcal/day, which is very clearly ludicrous! So that number was likely some unrelated statistic regurgitated by the AI. I found that number in at least 3 of the slop pages I waded through in my initial search.
So maybe most people don’t care how many calories we poop in a day, at least less-trivial facts are still findable? The problem is: we don’t know. It’s becoming harder and harder to tell what is actually written by a human vs. an AI, and the sheer quantity of AI articles thanks to free tier use of LLMs can make it seem like there’s a consensus about something when there really isn’t. Information on the web has never been totally trustworthy, but it used to be that near the top of most search results you’d find at least one or two trustworthy sources, so if you scanned through a few results that all corroborated each other, you could be somewhat confident you had a correct answer, and if you wanted to be more sure, most places would have citations you could dig into. That’s no longer true.
To find trustworthy information today, the process is more laborious: first, identify trustworthy single sources, and then search on those pages specifically, possibly combing through multiple until you have an answer. Wikipedia is still a great place to start, because their pages tend to have citations, and honestly, the quality of most of their information is already higher than the rest of what’s out there. But you will need to at least follow a few citation links to verify any information you find, which is time consuming.
The blame for this lies partly on search engines themselves, but both the free access to LLMs that the AI Hype Movement is providing (temporarily) to drive adoption, and the way these companies encourage and enable poor citation practices is a huge issue. When you use or promote these products, you’re feeding into this hype, and contributing to the resulting destruction.