I just wonder how many people smugly cry 'slop' and then immediately go ask chatgpt about something they want to know about. I suspect it's a surprisinly large amount.
Those are different though. One is just reading your own slop, the other is trying to make others read your slop. I don't love either one, but it's clear that one is a lot worse.
I would not extend it to cases where I’ve made the choice to interact with AI, no. Precisely because there is no pretense. I know that I’m dealing with an intelligent system that has different strengths and weaknesses than a human. I also know that I can (usually) direct that system to dial down its verbosity.
>If it’s not worth writing, it’s not worth reading.
that's why I keep all logging thoroughly disabled across all systems.
Saves a lot of room.
I don't get these new logic statements everyone is coming up with against AI systems.
If the excuse is "I meant literature!" well then I argue that where that line is drawn in the sand is exactly the question these kind of black and white expressions strolling entirely past.
(and that's actually the important question; where does it become neglectful for a human to throw an AI into the drivers seat wrt human read media?)
That’s a funny ad absurdum. But let’s be honest: if a coworker dumps a hundred lines of logs into a Slack channel without contextualization the reaction would understandably be ‘wtf am I supposed to do with this?’ Now what I’ll sometimes get is an accompanying AI-generated analysis of the logs. Out of diligence I’ll read them. To their credit, they usually mention the issue, but it’s buried down deep among so much noise. My time feels wasted. Eight paragraphs of Claudish could have been one sentence. My coworkers could have used AI to reduce it down to that one sentence and then rewrite it in their own words. They chose not to because that would have taken more time for them, not realizing the burden now shifts to me (the more expensive senior engineer).
My personal line in the sand is human-to-human communication. I’m fine with AI use on either end, but keep the channel clean. I see it as a sign of respecting each other’s time.
Btw, there are pre-genAI cases of generated text. Webshop product descriptions and sports news summaries, for instance – both of those are easily templatized. I guess the difference is there is no human name attached to them and they’re fairly short
> If it’s not worth writing, it’s not worth reading.
I mean, you didn't write that, you're just repeating a meme for the 1 millionth time. People have always been saying things they didn't write, and AI is just one new way.
But I still took time to thumb it out on my phone keyboard, just as I’m taking time to write this reply. The time it takes you to read this reply will likely be less than it took me to write. I accept that asymmetry because it’s how we as humans can convey that we thought something was worth saying. Long walls of AI slop flip the equation, placing the burden on the reader. It’s not about originality, not for me at least. It’s about respecting each other’s time as humans
"But I still took time to thumb it out on my phone keyboard"
Is that the part that matters when it comes to writing, the mechanical work of pressing the keys? Not the thinking? What if someone generates some AIslop text, and then re-types it out with their thumbs, is that then worthy of your time to read it, simply because some person felt strongly enough to retype it? Because that's basically what you did by re-posting memeslop.
Moreover, let's say you read something and you learned something from it and actually enjoyed reading it, but only afterwards find out it was written by AI. Does that mean you had wasted your time?
"Long walls of AI slop flip the equation"
Not really, there's always been long walls of human slop text to figure out if there's thinking behind it. You ever been manic or known someone with mania? Got ADHD and racing thoughts? The vast output of corporations and politicians? Nuff said.
Is there more now? Probably but it doesn't "flip the equation"; that was true after radio, tv, the internet, heck even the printing press. It's always been incumbent upon the reader to figure out the intent and quality of a piece of writing, no matter the source, and that's never been an easy or automatable task. Inb4 "but it used to be that writing something at least indicated a modicum of thought" memeslop, because that actually isn't true for the reasons I stated already.
I understand the sensation of disgust when being offered to read a piece of AI slop. However, I'm actually curious about how our sensitivity towards slop will evolve. I imagine people will have varying degrees of tolerance.
Afterall, AI slop doesn't necessarily mean the prompter didn't read. It just means they're OK with the AI phrasing. It's also possible that they read the output and had the AI update with whatever edits they prompted.
Writing this comment makes me more convinced that if us users of AI want our written work to be taken seriously, then we should also share our prompts. I hope we quickly converge into a standard way of sharing the prompts that generated a given product.
Sometimes at work I get slop emails from some VP or other, and the problem isn't the tone or use use of AI per se, it's that 2 sentences of meaningful content is diluted into 3 paragraphs for no discernible reason.
doesn't follow. You don't know that they didn't read it! Only that they didn't write it. If the point of things like this is to be careful, then be careful.
To be honest I don't particularly feel the need to give the benefit of the doubt to people who dump 10 paragraphs of AI on me. If they want to give a thorough explanation of it to prove they really understand it, that's fine and I can update on the new evidence, but I'm OK with my default baseline assumption being they didn't read it so I don't need to either.
The old social contract was that the writer had done more work than they were asking of the reader, but this is torn to shreds with LLM-generated text.
That is entirely invalid considering the existence of ghost writers and such.
No one reads a piece of text BECAUSE the writer had more work writing it than the writer will have reading it (this could end up not being true regardless of AI either way).
The “old social contract” is that readers trust the writers had something to say, and said it. The inner workings have always been irrelevant.
Trouble with genText is that it’s easy for your point to get lost in the narrative exactly because you didn’t write it—it’s like when you know something but can’t put it into words. Your own voice can get lost and so does the appeal to the readers. Nothing to do with effort, entirely to do with the content itself.
I don’t want to read your genAI text because I don’t trust that you managed to get your point across in prose, but I don’t mind reading an LLM’s output because I just wanted a piece of information.
The old social contract was between two humans. Effort was a consequence, not the target.
Fundamentally if I could have got the same outcome from an LLM as the “author” of an AI-generated piece, I value their effort at zero.
The more generative AI content there is in a piece, the less value it has per word.
Deep down our brains seem to know this, too.
LLM content is smooth, without novelty or surprises or shared amusement, and in text we have not summoned up ourselves, we are looking for that as a proxy for connection with the author.
I have used this analogy before but it’s like a rollercoaster without jerk or jounce; there are no thrills or interesting quirks for our brains.
So much so that when you see an AI-assisted piece of any length that has human-written sentences in it, they tend to stick out more, even before you have fully read the text, whereas the LLM words scan past so easily.
The thing that brings this home for me is that the final output of an LLM very rarely makes me chuckle at whimsy or weirdness, but the more disordered thinking traces more often do.
> The old social contract was that the writer had done more work than they were asking of the reader, but this is torn to shreds with LLM-generated text.
The problem is that your biases kick in long before you read the stuff. And I do not see a solution for this.
I write my devlog by hand and then run it through an LLM for a quick sanity check. Grammatical errors and spelling mistakes in stuff you publish in this age of AI is lazy. But I don't do it when I comment on HN/Reddit etc because this is stream-of-consciousness stuff and using AI actively interferes with my thought process.
My code is almost entirely written by LLMs today, but no one can judge how much time I spend on it unless they actively follow my comments on WA, Reddit, HN, my devlog and other places. All they would see is a repo with commits done in the space of a day with nice multi-para commit messages.
This is because I get an LLM to rewrite the entire commit tree once I stabilize a project and have it reproduce the final state in a sequential manner with bite-sized commits. My own development process involves 3-5 word opaque commit messages and a lot of squashing/force pushes: impenetrable/cryptic for anyone other than myself.
There is also the problem with pushing people --- for whom English is a second/third language --- out of entire conversations. Last year, I was talking (on Reddit) to someone from South America who was using LLMs to write in English and a few people were so dismissive of the messages.
I see this as an unstated case of preening.
For better or for worse, the world now communicates in English. You cannot shut people out --- because LLM --- when you yourself would not take the time to read someone if they wrote in Spanish or Russian or Japanese (or the ~25 commonly used languages from my own country).
people who are so unskilled in writing even a paragraph and need to have it generated for them are usually not skilled enough to notice the extremely rote, trite cliches that LLMs abuse over and over again, that make it glaringly obvious it's slop.
the the short quippy triplicate comparisons, the inability to contradict itself or reference itself, it's a stink you can pick up immediately and if I see it, it tells me you either can't tell, or didn't read it.
What is that character and human feel you speak of? All I see are two different ways of saying the exact same thing, nothing added or removed. Although of course the LLM version is more standardized English and structured.
If someone sends me LLM output that they read and thought was fine, then that's OK with me.
They might be wrong and it's not fine, and I have a few people I know who have a much higher tolerance than I do for LLM outputs, and I'm aware of that when they send them to me and I often reject it.
But it's a totally different category than someone who only skimmed what they sent me.
If someone sends me something they read and digested and think it's good, but I don't think it is, then I'm not upset with them. If someone sends me something without that first step, then I am.
(Of course they could tell me they didn't read it, and that's fine too, I can choose to read it or not.)
the code version of this is worse. an agent written PR looks exactly
like one the author read carefully. only test I've found is to ask
about one specific hunk, "why this and not X". you get a real answer
=in ten seconds or you don't.
Reminds me of my own manifesto, which I've written since getting sick of dealing with the hype and gatekeeping machine that surrounds AI based development right now.
Reminds me a little bit of that guy who made his company called "Polsia" about like one-shotting full companies or something. I think he had actual investors, would have loved to be in their internal staff meeting when the intern walked in and said "you know that spells AI slop right"
What I mostly find issue is with people pushing incorrect, buggy, and low skill human work when AI would do the work better. It's sad to see oldschool pros clutching to their pearls; These days I often find myself trying to push them to do something that AI _can't_ do as well, instead of forcing a comparison.
Care about people but always through caring about the product and making people capable of earning their dignity.
I used to feel this way, but now, I want more people to send me AI slop because I'm tired of human slop. I am tired of parsing through two word git commits where the author didn't care enough to tell Claude to write the commit message for them. Sure, I would prefer to read your personal thoughts on the change, but if the choice is between no meaningful information and an agent's mostly coherent if a bit verbose description, I'll take the AI.
The same goes for AI generated code. I've seen some code that I'm pretty sure would have been better quality if my 90 year old grandma was steering Claude. The standard that I want to hold myself is derived from the open source world like SQLite. Sadly, some people just want to take the minimal path to ticket completion without regard for future maintenance or pride in their work. At least AI is token predicting off the code bases that I admire.
76 comments
[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 10.7 ms ] threadThat said, wouldn’t it be funny if this site, too, were AI generated?
Would you extend that approach to the conversations you have with AI? If not, why not?
that's why I keep all logging thoroughly disabled across all systems.
Saves a lot of room.
I don't get these new logic statements everyone is coming up with against AI systems.
If the excuse is "I meant literature!" well then I argue that where that line is drawn in the sand is exactly the question these kind of black and white expressions strolling entirely past.
(and that's actually the important question; where does it become neglectful for a human to throw an AI into the drivers seat wrt human read media?)
My personal line in the sand is human-to-human communication. I’m fine with AI use on either end, but keep the channel clean. I see it as a sign of respecting each other’s time.
Btw, there are pre-genAI cases of generated text. Webshop product descriptions and sports news summaries, for instance – both of those are easily templatized. I guess the difference is there is no human name attached to them and they’re fairly short
I mean, you didn't write that, you're just repeating a meme for the 1 millionth time. People have always been saying things they didn't write, and AI is just one new way.
Is that the part that matters when it comes to writing, the mechanical work of pressing the keys? Not the thinking? What if someone generates some AIslop text, and then re-types it out with their thumbs, is that then worthy of your time to read it, simply because some person felt strongly enough to retype it? Because that's basically what you did by re-posting memeslop.
Moreover, let's say you read something and you learned something from it and actually enjoyed reading it, but only afterwards find out it was written by AI. Does that mean you had wasted your time?
"Long walls of AI slop flip the equation"
Not really, there's always been long walls of human slop text to figure out if there's thinking behind it. You ever been manic or known someone with mania? Got ADHD and racing thoughts? The vast output of corporations and politicians? Nuff said.
Is there more now? Probably but it doesn't "flip the equation"; that was true after radio, tv, the internet, heck even the printing press. It's always been incumbent upon the reader to figure out the intent and quality of a piece of writing, no matter the source, and that's never been an easy or automatable task. Inb4 "but it used to be that writing something at least indicated a modicum of thought" memeslop, because that actually isn't true for the reasons I stated already.
Afterall, AI slop doesn't necessarily mean the prompter didn't read. It just means they're OK with the AI phrasing. It's also possible that they read the output and had the AI update with whatever edits they prompted.
Writing this comment makes me more convinced that if us users of AI want our written work to be taken seriously, then we should also share our prompts. I hope we quickly converge into a standard way of sharing the prompts that generated a given product.
If you couldn't bother to read it, why should I?
doesn't follow. You don't know that they didn't read it! Only that they didn't write it. If the point of things like this is to be careful, then be careful.
Did you even read it through carefully once? If you couldn't bother to craft it, why should I read?
If I'm reading reference material/documentation or an update, I care a bit less so long as it isn't tedious.
The old social contract was that the writer had done more work than they were asking of the reader, but this is torn to shreds with LLM-generated text.
No one reads a piece of text BECAUSE the writer had more work writing it than the writer will have reading it (this could end up not being true regardless of AI either way).
The “old social contract” is that readers trust the writers had something to say, and said it. The inner workings have always been irrelevant.
Trouble with genText is that it’s easy for your point to get lost in the narrative exactly because you didn’t write it—it’s like when you know something but can’t put it into words. Your own voice can get lost and so does the appeal to the readers. Nothing to do with effort, entirely to do with the content itself.
I don’t want to read your genAI text because I don’t trust that you managed to get your point across in prose, but I don’t mind reading an LLM’s output because I just wanted a piece of information.
The old social contract was between two humans. Effort was a consequence, not the target.
The more generative AI content there is in a piece, the less value it has per word.
Deep down our brains seem to know this, too.
LLM content is smooth, without novelty or surprises or shared amusement, and in text we have not summoned up ourselves, we are looking for that as a proxy for connection with the author.
I have used this analogy before but it’s like a rollercoaster without jerk or jounce; there are no thrills or interesting quirks for our brains.
So much so that when you see an AI-assisted piece of any length that has human-written sentences in it, they tend to stick out more, even before you have fully read the text, whereas the LLM words scan past so easily.
The thing that brings this home for me is that the final output of an LLM very rarely makes me chuckle at whimsy or weirdness, but the more disordered thinking traces more often do.
The problem is that your biases kick in long before you read the stuff. And I do not see a solution for this.
I write my devlog by hand and then run it through an LLM for a quick sanity check. Grammatical errors and spelling mistakes in stuff you publish in this age of AI is lazy. But I don't do it when I comment on HN/Reddit etc because this is stream-of-consciousness stuff and using AI actively interferes with my thought process.
My code is almost entirely written by LLMs today, but no one can judge how much time I spend on it unless they actively follow my comments on WA, Reddit, HN, my devlog and other places. All they would see is a repo with commits done in the space of a day with nice multi-para commit messages.
This is because I get an LLM to rewrite the entire commit tree once I stabilize a project and have it reproduce the final state in a sequential manner with bite-sized commits. My own development process involves 3-5 word opaque commit messages and a lot of squashing/force pushes: impenetrable/cryptic for anyone other than myself.
There is also the problem with pushing people --- for whom English is a second/third language --- out of entire conversations. Last year, I was talking (on Reddit) to someone from South America who was using LLMs to write in English and a few people were so dismissive of the messages.
I see this as an unstated case of preening.
For better or for worse, the world now communicates in English. You cannot shut people out --- because LLM --- when you yourself would not take the time to read someone if they wrote in Spanish or Russian or Japanese (or the ~25 commonly used languages from my own country).
Also the distinction between whether they read/wrote it is nil. Either is disrespectful.
> You don't know that they didn't read it!
If someone sends me AI slop to read then I am going to assume and behave as if they didn’t read it until proven otherwise.
It is the responsibility of the sender to proactively say “I read this and stand by it as at least mostly correct and reasonable”.
They are also free to say “AI slop have not yet proof read”. Then I have an informed choice.
the the short quippy triplicate comparisons, the inability to contradict itself or reference itself, it's a stink you can pick up immediately and if I see it, it tells me you either can't tell, or didn't read it.
They might be wrong and it's not fine, and I have a few people I know who have a much higher tolerance than I do for LLM outputs, and I'm aware of that when they send them to me and I often reject it.
But it's a totally different category than someone who only skimmed what they sent me.
If someone sends me something they read and digested and think it's good, but I don't think it is, then I'm not upset with them. If someone sends me something without that first step, then I am.
(Of course they could tell me they didn't read it, and that's fine too, I can choose to read it or not.)
I think maybe just AI;DR...?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49849134
Reminds me of my own manifesto, which I've written since getting sick of dealing with the hype and gatekeeping machine that surrounds AI based development right now.
https://www.just-prompt-motherfucker.com/
> Not anti-AI. Pro-giving-a-damn.
AI isn't the problem. The problem is that people are sending text without proof reading.
edit: didn't realize i verbatim repeated what everyone else said
It should be line https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
The irony...
https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
Care about people but always through caring about the product and making people capable of earning their dignity.
The same goes for AI generated code. I've seen some code that I'm pretty sure would have been better quality if my 90 year old grandma was steering Claude. The standard that I want to hold myself is derived from the open source world like SQLite. Sadly, some people just want to take the minimal path to ticket completion without regard for future maintenance or pride in their work. At least AI is token predicting off the code bases that I admire.