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.
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.
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.
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 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 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'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 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 can say first hand after having years of my life blown 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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ironic that this site is AI-generated
> a boundary, not an acronym problem
The irony...
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 irony is it's ai generated. It has codex's markings all over it. That lime green look is a dead giveaway.
> 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?
The other similar site making the rounds, https://noslopgrenade.com/, is indeed in part written by AI as evaluated by Pangram.
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.
Is that with or without the slop grenade examples included, because I can see how those might trigger the detector
Without.
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.
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.
[delayed]
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.
it's 100% written by ai lmao
It is hard to know what is getting more tired, 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..
Well.. don't think I'll be reading because the site is AI
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.
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/
I prefer the simpler “aidr”
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.
Really don't like the weird grey yellow sites...they're just ugly
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'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 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.
This is largely a Claude problem and GPT models don't suffer from it to nearly the same extent.
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 can say first hand after having years of my life blown 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.
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/
AI Slop; Didn't Bother AS;DB
I’m a fan of AI;DR
Ironic that this itself is an obvious slop site
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"