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.
Well, they can serve it that way. Based on my experience, everyone knows who the person always serving slop on the team is except the person serving slop.
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.
I don't understand this bandwagoning either. I'm a shit writer, there I dont write, but if I could prompt some AI w/ my thoughts and it generated something that passed for writing and wasn't shit, then you wouldn't be injesting my awesome insights b/c you think AI made them and dismiss it out of some kinda of hurrdurr spite? Makes no sense, and lets not forget the English-as-second language crowd, I guess they have nothing to say either...
here's my comment ran thru ChatGPT, I hope you dont read it!
"""
I don’t really understand the bandwagoning around this either. I’m a terrible writer, so I generally don’t write much. But if I could give an AI my thoughts and have it turn them into something clear, readable, and actually worth reading, why would that suddenly make the ideas themselves less valuable?
You’d be dismissing my thoughts—not because they’re bad, but because AI helped me express them. That just seems like reflexive “AI bad” nonsense.
And that’s before you even get to people who speak English as a second language. Are we really saying their ideas somehow count for less if they use AI to communicate them more clearly? That makes no sense to me.
"""
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.
Yeah how many times have we seen this sort of thing on HN now? We get it, people hate AI writing. But screeds like this can be even more annoying as it's pure clickbait for the HN crowd as every time these sorts of posts rocket to #1 on the homepage just like this one is now. HNers say they don't like algorithmic feeds but they sure fall for the same sort of thing they decry others for falling for.
On a more recent note, today I'm really fed up with Opus 5.5.
Yes, it's the best model right now if you want cheaper than Astra, but they increased the verbosity again!
It just keeps dumping whole novels on me. Its writing might be an improvement over the ludicrous Opus 5 speak, but much of the grating way of speaking is still there.
It's been three days since Tuesday and I'm already tired of Opus 5.5.
Hard disagree, I’m finding Opus 5.5 so much more pleasant to work with in comparison to its predecessor. Much less of the invented jargon that I got from the last version, or Fable 5.1. Still a bit wordy, sure, but you can dial that down in the settings. I’m wondering what I’m doing differently from you, or is it just a Geschmacksache?
I wasn't aware of the setting - I changed it to "Concise" now, thanks.
Opus 5 was in another league. But often Opus 5.5 still has its moments.
I was informing it of a bug and it started its lengthy response with: "I confirmed less than I claimed" as if I had just accused it of being wrong or otherwise complained.
I found that one weird, and it reminded me that I am talking to Claude rather than an OpenAI model.
IMO I'd rather have fewer enshittified unusable websites so filled with ads I can't actually read anything than some awkwardly written paragraphs that I can skim/move on. I'd rather the pitchforks have been pointed at ad revenue toxicity the past decade than the AI stuff being the focal. Just my opinion.
> Part of not allowing it to become normalized is complaining about it.
This seems like a fantasy to me, maybe you can offer an example where it played out like that for something that had a wide appeal or value to a lot of people. Ignoring the people complaining seems just as likely to be positive reinforcement.
I'm curious what value you think people are getting by being able to spew out large amounts of low to mid quality writing. I'm not saying we should complain about AI in general, just how some people use it.
> maybe you can offer an example where it played out like that for something that had a wide appeal or value to a lot of people
Sure, the French aristocracy had wide appeal and value for a lot of people, complaining played a part in keeping their behavior from becoming normalized even further.
> I'm curious what value you think people are getting
Writing is hard, AI writing is not hard, that seems to be it in a nutshell. Not everyone has the same judgement of writing quality. AI tends to write with a very persuasive voice and use a lot of figurative language, maybe that is exactly what they want. I don't really know, but the point is that they find it valuable and it was easy, that seems like enough.
On the more understandable side, there are a lot of people who use it to translate what they wrote into another language.
how about the opposite: a massive resurgence of slur usage and inflammatory open bigotry in general conversations is going on right now, especially with kids, because people allowed it to be normalized without pushback. Some of the shit hear every day, online and irl, would've got you clapped from your job or expelled a decade or so ago. Even if you do find it offputting, without greater support if you stand up to it, many people don't, because in turn it'll cost them more than it costs the person saying it.
normalization works, and therefore it's important to not be a part of it and be brave enough to create an atmosphere where it's a bad idea socially. If you can't trust people to understand that plagiarism is bad, then I guess you've just got to make it toxic to be associated with.
My friend's teenage son went through a phase where he would say a lot of awful shit that he didn't really understand. He explained to us why he and his friends thought it was funny, it was all the people freaking out about it.
People didn't just sit idly by and let bigotry make a comeback, there is a massive amount of pushback, to a degree that it can be unhinged. That is exactly why it has so much appeal to some people.
I came up with it before that but I'm not going to claim I'm the only one, or even that I didn't hear it somewhere and have it get into my weights and stochastically parrot it later.
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.
I can't even force myself to read Claude's multi-paragraph PR summaries, and instead just go read the code. They're barely coherent and incredibly verbose.
I'm struggling to get people to give me a good summary line. Even if I just ignore the commit message body, I still want a meaningful summary line so git blame will be accurate.
I joined this team not long ago, and I was trying to add a new feature to an API server. I saw a pretty obvious UnboundaLocalError that would occur given the right parameters. I hovered over the line and saw, "fix login". I then looked at the git log for that file and found three commits with the same text. No explanation of how login was broken, how it was fixed, and it introduced a bug. Some people care less and have less diligence than the AI agents.
I have a standard that I hold myself to which falls somewhere in the middle w.r.t. AI usage, but for the other people I work with, I want them to maximize their AI usage.
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.
I hope that labs are actively working on the voice and writing styles of their models.
I don't want to read slop in large part because their prose is overly verbose and complicated.
If the models were writing simple sentences in mainstream English, mirroring the vocabulary used by my colleagues, I'd mind less than the current status.
I think they definitely are. One of the Opus 5.5 selling points in the release announcement was something like "less jargoney / rambling communication"
Might be a long road, but at least we'll have no shortage of good instagram memes in the meantime
I've been thinking the same. Imagine 5 years from now - nothing is slowing down. The pace that my SW teams can produce legitimately good code that my Sr devs are like "yeah looks good, comes with test coverage, tests look good, CI is green, ship it" - it's insane.
For written work, i think we're so new that over a couple years two things will happen
1 - people get kinda used to it (frog in pot?)
2 - the AI will keep getting better and reducing these cringey sounding tells
What will be tough is finding that line of "does this paragraph add value to X" but that applies whether a person wrote it or an AI.
I can say first hand after having years of my life blown up by an (eventually) AI slop powered vexatious litigant and the thousands of pages of slop filings and slop evidence forgeries I had to read... I feel a physical urge to give anyone who slops me a black eye.
Probably not a typical response-- but perhaps it's useful to keep in mind that every day there are many people being victimized by attackers using AI (and shitty corporations.. wait I repeat myself). So in addition to the ordinary signals of indifference, ignorance, and carelessness that hitting someone with obvious LLM slop implies you'll also be accidentally taking on the voice of some people's abusers, and pick up the spillover effects of their impressions.
This can happen randomly, of course, -- picking up a chose phrase that someone else used-- but slop isn't just a random match. Right now an AI written piece (especially from claude) will identify itself over and over and over again in a way that wouldn't happen with another writer that happened to share some cultural background.
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.
There has been an ancient form of slop that the highest form of authority has read for hundreds of years, and its a presidential brief... The President doesn't reads all the stuff that goes on, he doesn't know, he is handled the a slopified version of reality. Now the presidential briefing is at everyone's hand.
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 believe that one was discussed with the author on HN, and that they used AI to 'copyedit'. Unfortunately that's a trap because if you make a general copyediting request most LLMs will absolutely slopify your work-- and make edits that are unambiguously bad as well as just making it look like lazy llm output.
The better use is to ask it to point out grammatical and spelling errors, or phrasing which is unclear.. then go fix yourself (or direct highly targeted fixes that don't let it slopify). Never hand the clanker the pen for your writing unless you're looking to subject everyone to your Honest Take That Recontextualizes Everything.
IME, it's best to ask an AI to criticize your work and suggest changes without providing actual rewrites, and make the changes you agree with in your own voice.
This is an outdated take. It used to be the case, but now detectors have low false positive rates. In other words good precision but not necessarily good recall for detecting AI. So some AI text evades detection, but when it flags something as AI, then it's usually right.
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.
There’s a difference between using and sharing. I don’t want to see your notebook. I want to see the finished document. To some of us, the difference is intuitively obvious, so we’re offended by what we’re getting at work these days.
I'm very envious of your workplace if the stuff before AI was somehow well written. If I had AI 10 years ago I would've been mostly using it to interpret most of the corporate speak e-mails and poorly written technical briefs.
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.
While I agree with the sentiment, this:
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.
Well, they can serve it that way. Based on my experience, everyone knows who the person always serving slop on the team is except the person serving slop.
How do you tactfully fix that, or can you?
What the industry is discovering is that copywriting is actually a skill. And it becomes pretty obvious if you don’t have any of it.
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.
Perhaps:
Did you even read it through carefully once? If you couldn't bother to craft it, why should I read?
Especially for personal communication, I'm comfortable saying if you couldn't bother to write it, why should I read it.
If I'm reading reference material/documentation or an update, I care a bit less so long as it isn't tedious.
I like Oxide's version of this: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576#_llms_as_writers
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).
From my experience, they likely read 30% of it, convinced themselves that it was good enough and they thought about all of it, then shared it.
There’s no reason to give these people the benefit of the doubt if they bother doing this.
Also the distinction between whether they read/wrote it is nil. Either is disrespectful.
Strongly disagree with your sentiment.
> 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.
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.
I don't understand this bandwagoning either. I'm a shit writer, there I dont write, but if I could prompt some AI w/ my thoughts and it generated something that passed for writing and wasn't shit, then you wouldn't be injesting my awesome insights b/c you think AI made them and dismiss it out of some kinda of hurrdurr spite? Makes no sense, and lets not forget the English-as-second language crowd, I guess they have nothing to say either...
here's my comment ran thru ChatGPT, I hope you dont read it!
""" I don’t really understand the bandwagoning around this either. I’m a terrible writer, so I generally don’t write much. But if I could give an AI my thoughts and have it turn them into something clear, readable, and actually worth reading, why would that suddenly make the ideas themselves less valuable?
You’d be dismissing my thoughts—not because they’re bad, but because AI helped me express them. That just seems like reflexive “AI bad” nonsense.
And that’s before you even get to people who speak English as a second language. Are we really saying their ideas somehow count for less if they use AI to communicate them more clearly? That makes no sense to me. """
I much preferred your first draft just so you know. It actually has some character and feels human.
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.
Emotions were removed, clichés and meandering was added.
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.
The irony of this site being FLAGRANTLY slopcoded with AI. Has all the typical tropey phrases, fonts, and designs.
Here's a little tip: If you're going to truly take a stand against AI - you don't use AI to build the house.
Ironic that this site is AI-generated
Wouldn't hypocrite be more suitable?
Not really ironic. They even say it here:
> Not anti-AI. Pro-giving-a-damn.
AI isn't the problem. The problem is that people are sending text without proof reading.
Also applying several refinements for brevity!!
How many times have people written this exact same rant now? This is honestly getting more annoying than the AI generated content.
Yeah how many times have we seen this sort of thing on HN now? We get it, people hate AI writing. But screeds like this can be even more annoying as it's pure clickbait for the HN crowd as every time these sorts of posts rocket to #1 on the homepage just like this one is now. HNers say they don't like algorithmic feeds but they sure fall for the same sort of thing they decry others for falling for.
On a more recent note, today I'm really fed up with Opus 5.5.
Yes, it's the best model right now if you want cheaper than Astra, but they increased the verbosity again!
It just keeps dumping whole novels on me. Its writing might be an improvement over the ludicrous Opus 5 speak, but much of the grating way of speaking is still there.
It's been three days since Tuesday and I'm already tired of Opus 5.5.
Hard disagree, I’m finding Opus 5.5 so much more pleasant to work with in comparison to its predecessor. Much less of the invented jargon that I got from the last version, or Fable 5.1. Still a bit wordy, sure, but you can dial that down in the settings. I’m wondering what I’m doing differently from you, or is it just a Geschmacksache?
I wasn't aware of the setting - I changed it to "Concise" now, thanks.
Opus 5 was in another league. But often Opus 5.5 still has its moments.
I was informing it of a bug and it started its lengthy response with: "I confirmed less than I claimed" as if I had just accused it of being wrong or otherwise complained.
I found that one weird, and it reminded me that I am talking to Claude rather than an OpenAI model.
After testing today, the setting does not seem to help, like at all. Opus 5.5 just keeps writing essays.
And it manages to overcomplicate even the most simple concepts in its explanations.
It's still very poor compared to OpenAI models.
It’s Trump all over again
The first comment with "ai;dr", according to You were the first one on HN! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=5&prefix=true&que... is by user 'madcaptenor' from 11 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45722069#45725169
It is hard to know what is getting more tiresome, AI writing or complaining about AI writing. We get it, we feel the same way.
Part of not allowing it to become normalized is complaining about it..
Normalising complaining about a thing is the first step to normalising that thing.
IMO I'd rather have fewer enshittified unusable websites so filled with ads I can't actually read anything than some awkwardly written paragraphs that I can skim/move on. I'd rather the pitchforks have been pointed at ad revenue toxicity the past decade than the AI stuff being the focal. Just my opinion.
> Part of not allowing it to become normalized is complaining about it.
This seems like a fantasy to me, maybe you can offer an example where it played out like that for something that had a wide appeal or value to a lot of people. Ignoring the people complaining seems just as likely to be positive reinforcement.
> wide appeal or value to a lot of people.
I'm curious what value you think people are getting by being able to spew out large amounts of low to mid quality writing. I'm not saying we should complain about AI in general, just how some people use it.
> maybe you can offer an example where it played out like that for something that had a wide appeal or value to a lot of people
Sure, the French aristocracy had wide appeal and value for a lot of people, complaining played a part in keeping their behavior from becoming normalized even further.
> I'm curious what value you think people are getting
Writing is hard, AI writing is not hard, that seems to be it in a nutshell. Not everyone has the same judgement of writing quality. AI tends to write with a very persuasive voice and use a lot of figurative language, maybe that is exactly what they want. I don't really know, but the point is that they find it valuable and it was easy, that seems like enough.
On the more understandable side, there are a lot of people who use it to translate what they wrote into another language.
how about the opposite: a massive resurgence of slur usage and inflammatory open bigotry in general conversations is going on right now, especially with kids, because people allowed it to be normalized without pushback. Some of the shit hear every day, online and irl, would've got you clapped from your job or expelled a decade or so ago. Even if you do find it offputting, without greater support if you stand up to it, many people don't, because in turn it'll cost them more than it costs the person saying it.
normalization works, and therefore it's important to not be a part of it and be brave enough to create an atmosphere where it's a bad idea socially. If you can't trust people to understand that plagiarism is bad, then I guess you've just got to make it toxic to be associated with.
My friend's teenage son went through a phase where he would say a lot of awful shit that he didn't really understand. He explained to us why he and his friends thought it was funny, it was all the people freaking out about it.
People didn't just sit idly by and let bigotry make a comeback, there is a massive amount of pushback, to a degree that it can be unhinged. That is exactly why it has so much appeal to some people.
TAI;DR.
I think maybe just AI;DR...?
Yes, somebody else came up with that last month (AFAIK): https://www.rickmanelius.com/p/aidr-ai-didnt-read
I came up with it before that but I'm not going to claim I'm the only one, or even that I didn't hear it somewhere and have it get into my weights and stochastically parrot it later.
You were the first one on HN! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=5&prefix=true&que...
Don't feed my ego like that.
I've been seeing "AI;DR" used sparingly for months, perhaps years now.
AI;DR fits. Though some deserve a stronger response -- "AI;FU" -- like the disingenuous AI-powered hiring spam targeting HN users recently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49849134
AI written, AI read
https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
I have my AI agents read documents on my behalf and then ask them questions. Whether those documents are written by humans or not.
> a boundary, not an acronym problem
The irony...
I prefer the simpler “aidr”
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.
I can't even force myself to read Claude's multi-paragraph PR summaries, and instead just go read the code. They're barely coherent and incredibly verbose.
I'm struggling to get people to give me a good summary line. Even if I just ignore the commit message body, I still want a meaningful summary line so git blame will be accurate.
I joined this team not long ago, and I was trying to add a new feature to an API server. I saw a pretty obvious UnboundaLocalError that would occur given the right parameters. I hovered over the line and saw, "fix login". I then looked at the git log for that file and found three commits with the same text. No explanation of how login was broken, how it was fixed, and it introduced a bug. Some people care less and have less diligence than the AI agents.
I have a standard that I hold myself to which falls somewhere in the middle w.r.t. AI usage, but for the other people I work with, I want them to maximize their AI usage.
Too Bandwagony; Didn't Bother
Really don't like the weird grey yellow sites...they're just ugly
Not the startup-themed website featuring logins and calls to action…
Well.. don't think I'll be reading because the site is AI
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.
I hope that labs are actively working on the voice and writing styles of their models. I don't want to read slop in large part because their prose is overly verbose and complicated. If the models were writing simple sentences in mainstream English, mirroring the vocabulary used by my colleagues, I'd mind less than the current status.
Surely that's something that can be trained for.
I think they definitely are. One of the Opus 5.5 selling points in the release announcement was something like "less jargoney / rambling communication"
Might be a long road, but at least we'll have no shortage of good instagram memes in the meantime
This is largely a Claude problem and GPT models don't suffer from it to nearly the same extent.
You can create a skill for that today. No need for specific training.
I've been thinking the same. Imagine 5 years from now - nothing is slowing down. The pace that my SW teams can produce legitimately good code that my Sr devs are like "yeah looks good, comes with test coverage, tests look good, CI is green, ship it" - it's insane.
For written work, i think we're so new that over a couple years two things will happen 1 - people get kinda used to it (frog in pot?) 2 - the AI will keep getting better and reducing these cringey sounding tells
What will be tough is finding that line of "does this paragraph add value to X" but that applies whether a person wrote it or an AI.
I can say first hand after having years of my life blown up by an (eventually) AI slop powered vexatious litigant and the thousands of pages of slop filings and slop evidence forgeries I had to read... I feel a physical urge to give anyone who slops me a black eye.
Probably not a typical response-- but perhaps it's useful to keep in mind that every day there are many people being victimized by attackers using AI (and shitty corporations.. wait I repeat myself). So in addition to the ordinary signals of indifference, ignorance, and carelessness that hitting someone with obvious LLM slop implies you'll also be accidentally taking on the voice of some people's abusers, and pick up the spillover effects of their impressions.
This can happen randomly, of course, -- picking up a chose phrase that someone else used-- but slop isn't just a random match. Right now an AI written piece (especially from claude) will identify itself over and over and over again in a way that wouldn't happen with another writer that happened to share some cultural background.
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.
I don't want your prompt either. Do the work to make "your" writing not sound like AI, or write it yourself, or don't expect me to read it.
Related in August, lots of discussion:
AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49336573
There has been an ancient form of slop that the highest form of authority has read for hundreds of years, and its a presidential brief... The President doesn't reads all the stuff that goes on, he doesn't know, he is handled the a slopified version of reality. Now the presidential briefing is at everyone's hand.
Really cool!
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/
All the visually noisy parts really don't help it get the point across. More like the opposite.
It should be line https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
omg i love that. reminds me of the hours i've spent on the paperclip game
Most people at my work don't think I'm using AI simply because I instruct it to never use more than two sentences of max 10-15 words each.
Need a "website is Claudish; skipping to next" one-pager.
Do they really not understand that their website uses the most definitive form of design slop?
Ironic that this itself is an obvious slop site
I'm not reading any slop, period.
AI Slop; Didn't Bother AS;DB
I’m a fan of AI;DR
another day another gatekeeping rant
Random text in many random places is quintessential slop
the irony here is that this entire website is dripping with AI design slop
edit: didn't realize i verbatim repeated what everyone else said
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"
Is this supposed to be different than the simpler more standard formatted AI;DR?
You really think you coined this,"Ben"?
Also, building this in the bog sloppy way? c'mon.
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.
If it’s not worth writing, it’s not worth reading.
That said, wouldn’t it be funny if this site, too, were AI generated?
The other similar site making the rounds, https://noslopgrenade.com/, is indeed in part written by AI as evaluated by Pangram.
I believe that one was discussed with the author on HN, and that they used AI to 'copyedit'. Unfortunately that's a trap because if you make a general copyediting request most LLMs will absolutely slopify your work-- and make edits that are unambiguously bad as well as just making it look like lazy llm output.
The better use is to ask it to point out grammatical and spelling errors, or phrasing which is unclear.. then go fix yourself (or direct highly targeted fixes that don't let it slopify). Never hand the clanker the pen for your writing unless you're looking to subject everyone to your Honest Take That Recontextualizes Everything.
IME, it's best to ask an AI to criticize your work and suggest changes without providing actual rewrites, and make the changes you agree with in your own voice.
Is that with or without the slop grenade examples included, because I can see how those might trigger the detector
Without.
AI detectors are useless. I don't know how this forum got so infected with Pangram shills, but at this point they need to be banned.
Apart from their own data, a lot of people's anecdotal experience is that its pretty accurate, why would they need to banned for that?
This is an outdated take. It used to be the case, but now detectors have low false positive rates. In other words good precision but not necessarily good recall for detecting AI. So some AI text evades detection, but when it flags something as AI, then it's usually right.
The irony is it's ai generated. It has codex's markings all over it. That lime green look is a dead giveaway.
it's 100% written by ai lmao
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.
There’s a difference between using and sharing. I don’t want to see your notebook. I want to see the finished document. To some of us, the difference is intuitively obvious, so we’re offended by what we’re getting at work these days.
I'm very envious of your workplace if the stuff before AI was somehow well written. If I had AI 10 years ago I would've been mostly using it to interpret most of the corporate speak e-mails and poorly written technical briefs.
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.
> If it’s not worth writing, it’s not worth reading.
Would you extend that approach to the conversations you have with AI? If not, why not?
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.
This website is ironically too AI to read.